Expert: Ran - 5/20/2009

Question
QUESTION: I work on a network and when another employee tries to open up a file that I have created it says it's read only. How do I remove the read only

ANSWER: Sorry for the late reply, I have been away for a few days.

CorelDraw, like most programmes, locks the file during editing. This prevents one person accidentally overwriting another person's work in progress.

This behaviour is by design.

The solution is to make sure the file is closed elsewhere before trying to open it.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: All files are closed when opening. Still when I try to edit a file another person in the office has created it say read-only.

Answer
Ha, it starts to become more interesting!

I think that one of these three things is occuring:
1. The server is not releasing the file lock when you close the file. Usually this problem goes away on NTFS file systems which are substantially more robust that FAT or FAT32.

2. CorelDraw really IS creating a file with its "READ-ONLY" attribute set (extremely doubtful). You could right-click/properties on the .cdr file in Windows Explorer and see if the Read Only box is ticked.

3. The destination folder does not grant write permissions to all users. Right-click the destination folder on your server, click Properties/Security and make sure the relevant security group has 'Modify' permissions. You will need Admin rights to make changes here and the above method is for Server 2003. The procedure is substantially more complicated, long-winded and annoying with Server 2008 but please don't get me started on that one!

Please let me know what happens!