Locked Items

The locked items area of iCM Management lets you manage all of the items across your iCM installation that have been locked.

Types of Content Lock

Locked items are items that cannot be edited for some reason. There are three types of lock.

Transiently Locked Items

This is by far the most common type of locked item. An item becomes transiently locked when someone is editing it. This prevents more than one user trying to edit the same item at once.

Almost all items in iCM can become locked, including groups, users, articles, media, forms, approval requirements - in fact, everything that can be edited.

The locks placed on transiently locked items are removed as soon as the user editing the item submits it, cancels their edit, logs out of iCM or closes their browser.

The only time you might find an item appearing as transiently locked when it shouldn't be, is if someone starts editing something, then leaves their desk and goes on holiday without logging out of iCM or cancelling their edit (and leaves their PC running...). However, remember that there is an iCM Scheduled Tasks called InactiveCSUserLogout that will automatically log out inactive users, unlocking any items they have forgotten about.

To manually unlock a transiently locked item, right-click on it and select "Unlock". This will kick the other user out of the item, and does mean that any changes they have started to make but not submitted will be lost.

Persistently Locked Items

There are two types of persistent lock.

Persistent locks can be applied by iCM users to media items, preventing them from being edited by anyone but their user. See Locking Media Items for more information. Normally a media item should be unlocked by the user who placed the lock on it, but an iCM administrator with access to this locked items section of iCM can manually unlock the item by right-clicking on it an selecting "Unlock".

iCM places persistent locks on iCM mailings and iCM mailing rules when they are scheduled to be used at some point in the future. This is so that the scheduled mailing and rule cannot be interrupted. The persistent lock will be removed once the mailing has been sent. If you do need to edit a mailing, the user who set up the schedule can do this without removing the lock from here.

iCM may also place persistent locks on some items during import and export processes.

Work in Progress and Approval Articles

When an article has a work in progress version, the original article becomes locked until the work in progress version is submitted or deleted.

Articles that are going through an approval process are also locked in a similar way. The original article will be locked until the updated version requiring approval is either accepted or deleted.

These types of article cannot be unlocked from here. You will need to find the approval or work in progress version and either delete or submit it.