SharePoint: Office documents open in read-only mode

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Issue

A SharePoint 2013 installation and clients with IE 11 and Office 2013. When clients navigate to a document library and click to open an Office document, the document opens in read-only mode with an information bar stating "We opened this document read-only from the server" and with a button to enable editing.

Cause

There could be many reasons for the issue like not having proper user permissions to edit doc in site, IE compatibility issues, and client system issues.

Solutions

Solution 1: Permissions

Ensure the user has proper permissions on the site to edit the documents and at least to contribute.

Solution 2: Browsers compatibility

Ensure IE is compatible with SharePoint and that no issues occur with IE. IE 11 has some compatibility issues with SharePoint so check with other browsers.

Solution 3: Registry

Please follow the steps below in a client computer to resolve the issue.

  1. On the client computer experiencing the issue, click "RUN" and then type "RegEdit"
  2.  Go to this path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Internet
    1. NOTE: For SharePoint 2013 the folder is 15.0
  3. Right-click and create a new "DWORD" entry and give it a name of "FSSHTTPOff"
  4.  Double-click the new entry and enter 1 for the value
  5.  Once done you need to reboot the computer

References