Read-only document displays Check Out button in MS Word “Server Document” bar

Question

Similar to the issue described here, I have a customer whose users see the "Check Out" button when opening Word 2007 documents directly from a document library with the checkin/out enabled.

Although the user only has Visitor (Read-only) permissions for the file, the Check Out button still shows up in the "Server Document" when they open the .docx in the Word 2007 client.

Security is still enforced when the user attempts to check out the file (generating a popup with the following error: "Cannot perform this operation. The file has been deleted or someone else has it checked out."). This is, however, an annoyance and addition to their gulp end user training!

Anyone have any ideas on how to hide the Check Out button in this scenario?

In addition, here is another similar unresolved thread on the MSDN forums: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3354381&SiteID=1&mode=1 (offline)

Answer 1

One resolution is to implement a customization to change the click of a Read Only user to function just like the Send To -> Download a Copy. You would need to overwrite the default functionality in core.js for the Read Only user's click action (bypassing the SharePoint Open Documents ActiveX control: owssupp.dll) and implement the functionality of the download.aspx for ReadOnly ("Visitor") users.

However, modifying the core.js file itself will put you in an unsupported state, so you would need to take an approach like the one described in the post below:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sowmyancs/archive/2008/04/02/customization-of-core-js-file-in-sharepoint.aspx

Taking this approach is still a workaround, but it eliminates the potentially confusing/annoying Check Out button for Read Only users for docs stored in a document library where check out/in is a hard requirement.