MS Office 2010 apps requiring force quit every 20-30 minutes on client stations in a 10.10.5 Server environement

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MS Office 2010 apps requiring force quit every 20-30 minutes on client stations in a 10.10.5 Server environement

Hi all. I have been a service technician for about 5 years, but recently started supporting a medium sized office of about 25 people. They run Yosemite server. The clients are on 10.10.5 and the MS Office apps are up to date, but a lot of people in the office are having issues with slowness and MS apps freezing when working from the server. This occurs normally after a document from the server has been opened for a period of time. I suspect sometimes it has to do with the fact that there is no version control, but even for folks who are working on docs that no one else is using that day.

This all aside, are there hardware issues I should be considering? There don't seem to be any speed issues when copying data from client to NAS where all the MS documents live. It all appears to get messy when the documents are opened and being edited.

I'm looking for some advice on how to troubleshoot, but also suggestions for best practices given the setup, and easy to use open sourced software that might help. Alfresco seems to have some good opened sourced code with a healthy looking community.

It's a Mac Mini i7 Server with a Promise Pegasus attached.

Mac mini, OS X Server

Posted on Aug 28, 2015 2:51 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

John Agapitos

Level 1

33 points

Aug 29, 2015 4:15 AM in response to swillah

I am having similar issues after just recently upgrading from Mavericks to Yosemite server. I switched from smb to afp on the user home folders and found an improvement although some clients are still reporting issues with excel not able to save.

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Answer 2

Lexiepex

Level 6

14,102 points

Aug 29, 2015 4:34 AM in response to swillah

"MS Office 2010 apps"

?? afaik there is no such for mac.

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Answer 3

swillah Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 29, 2015 6:00 AM in response to Lexiepex

Yes, you're right. I have this brain block with MS Office 2011. I have a similar block with Office 365, always wanting to call it 360.

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Answer 4

swillah Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 29, 2015 6:47 AM in response to John Agapitos

Someone on another forum just suggested to check the SMB timeout settings which I am currently going to do. I will report back if it helps!

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Answer 5

Lexiepex

Level 6

14,102 points

Aug 29, 2015 6:53 AM in response to swillah

I have this brain block with MS Office 2011. I have a similar block with Office 365, always wanting to call it 360

This is really serious : the 360 is the name of the first real computers by IBM in the end of the sixties....

I hope that you can be helped still... 😁

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Answer 6

swillah Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 30, 2015 6:26 AM in response to Lexiepex

Haha my first Mac was an eMac. My first computer was a 386. The first computer I ever used was a Commodore. I think the IBM 360 must have been the great great great grandfather of the Commodore. 😀

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Answer 7

swillah Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 30, 2015 6:31 AM in response to John Agapitos

Good to know! The guys who built and configured the server are coming in tomorrow morning. I'm hoping they can shed some light on what's happening here.

Sub question if you feel like answering. I have found that some clients connect as AFP and some as SMB. They are all on Yosemite. I thought that by default, they would connect by SMB3 if on Yosemite. What dictates how they connect? All computers except two in the office is on Yosemite. One is on Snow Leopard and one old PC laptop for FOB programming on Vista.

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Answer 8

Lexiepex

Level 6

14,102 points

Aug 30, 2015 10:37 AM in response to swillah

The IBM 360/25 (a small computer in the series 360) was the size of a small appartment !! 4K central memory, input with punchcards. 😁

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Answer 9

Sep 4, 2015 9:16 AM in response to swillah

Microsoft does not play nice with Office for Mac and a network file server. One issue to look at is that the network share point will have an invisible folder on it called .TemporaryItems this folder needs to be writeable and accessible to all users, the default will be the first user will be the owner and have access but subsequent users will not. This folder is located at the 'root' i.e. top of the network share point.

Also, you need to be careful of two users logging in with the same credentials at the same time, they will then try using the same sub-folder in .TemporaryItems and may 'fight' over who has control over that sub-folder.

I would hope that normally you have each user with a unique login to help avoid the later issue.

Yet another issue with Office for Mac relates to auto-saving, Office for Mac has had a history of not releasing previous auto-saves from memory with the result that after a period of time so many auto-saves are being tracked that it has run out of the maximum number of files it can open at one time. When this happens you may get inaccurate messages saying the disk is full, or cannot be written to. Doing a Save-As sometimes helps, or pasting the content in to a brand new document and then saving that.

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Answer 10

swillah Author

Level 1

13 points

Sep 4, 2015 9:17 AM in response to John Lockwood

Thank you for this! I checked the .TemporaryItems folder, and everyone has read/write. I don't believe anyone uses the same credentials. Is there a way to disable the Auto-save feature on the client Macs? Would that be helpful?

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Answer 11

Sep 4, 2015 9:28 AM in response to swillah

Disabling auto-save obviously means they lose that protection, but yet it can be turned off. Go to Preferences in Word, Select Save, and un-tick AutoRecover every xx minutes.

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