Unlock items: need easier way to tell when an item was locked

Knowledge Base
edited October 2016 in
If item is locked by other user then you see Lock icon for it and name of the user when you hover mouse over that icon.
1) Could you add date/time of lock moment in that hover message. This will allow to get if it's in work (e.g. it was locked in last hour) or user just forgot to unlock it (e.g. it has been locked for last 5 days without any changes in item history)
2) Could you add action for locked items: send request for unlock to user who locked it. It allows to ping his/her in one click without switching to other tools for communication. It could be more useful the bigger team is using requirements

What do you think about it?

Comments

  • Kristina King
    edited June 2016
    Interesting ideas, Igor, thank you for these clear suggestions. I'm curious what prompted these requests—have you noticed a lot of administrative overhead with locked items?
  • Knowledge Base
    edited June 2016
    Actually no, we don't have such overhead.
    Our team is big enough and distributed. As a result from time to time we face with cases when you have to update item but it's locked (sometimes accidentally)  by your colleague or customer in the same or other time zone. So you have small quest to find out reason of lock and unlock item with the help of person who locked or admin.
  • Kristina King
    edited June 2016
    Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
  • Rolland Vandersluis
    edited June 2016
    I would also appreciate making it a LOT easier to notice if you (a given user) has items locked. I don't want to have to remind my users to check this manually (requiring a very esoteric process) by clicking on their name and then clicking on the My Locked Items tab. 

    Recommendations:
    • When someone has locked an item(s) for edit, invoke a notification on the page header area (there's plenty of room for that).
    • When closing their browser session or logging out, alert the user that they have unlocked items. Provide a link to a list of the items (could be same list My Locked Items as noted above), AND make each item a hyperlink to the item, so that the user can view the item in context.
  • Kristina King
    edited October 2016
    Dutch, I agree that those recommendations would definitely resolve the issues. Thanks for bringing those up.
  • Elsa Mieusset
    edited October 2016
    Hi,

    to add to the discussion, locked items are causing issues when they are part of a sync process via JIH. It's not explicit in the JIH that the error is simply due to item being locked ("Authentication fail" msg can relate to other issues). And users don't necessarily see that the sync is in error and therefore items go out of sync before anyone notices.
    I also believe in our context that most items are accidentally locked, therefore notifying the user of locked items at log out would: 
    1) limit the risk of having items out of sync
    2) make people responsible so if an item is locked admin can assume that it was on purpose.

    Thanks
  • Kristina King
    edited October 2016
    These are really good points, Elsa. Thanks for pointing them out.
  • As an admin the listing of locks for Jama as a whole is in an awkward place underneath my personal profile? I feel like this should be under the admin tab instead as its own item or as part of one of the others. I would expect to see items that I have locked there, but I wasn't expecting to find the global lock list there and it still feels weird to get to for when someone asks me who has an item locked.
    Brian Hair
    Software Engineer I
    ETC
  • Hi Jama,

    Is there any progress regarding to simplification of unlocking items? We receive complaints about locked items very often. Mainly in a case when user open the item for editing and suddenly close tab or browser and leave. Then it is necessary to ask organizational admin (support team) to unlock the item. It would be good to allow project admin to be able to unlock the items or to have time lock when the lock is automatically released after a certain time.
    Vlada
  • @Vladimir we have not changed how locking works, and there isn't anything on the current roadmap for this.
  • Victor Cheung
    edited February 2018
    Can we improve the ability to unlock items?

    Currently, we have many pages of locked items and it's hard to pinpoint the exact item in question because the ID column does not display the entire ID and cannot be widened:

    unlock items tab
    For example, it would be extremely helpful to have a search box that we could type in the ID to locate the item immediately.  Or, even more efficient, to have a "unlock this item" option in the context menu for Admins so they can simply right-click any locked items in the Project explorer to unlock them (and/or select multiple locked items in List view and have the "unlock items" option from the Action menu).


    victor
  • Harald Hotz-Behofsits
    edited February 2018
    change the position of the ID column, then you can change the width. Changing the width of the last column does not work.
  • Victor Cheung
    edited May 2018
    Apologies for my very late response:   

    Thank You, Harald !!!  :)   Didn't know it was possible to reorder those columns!  

    Cheers!
    victor