Referring ticket # 17174503

"When two or more people are working on a document at the same time, they might make changes that conflict with each other. Conflicts can occur when one person works offline and then saves the document to the server. Conflicts can also occur when two people work on the same part of a document at exactly the same time. When edits conflict, the file would display a notification the next time that a user tries to save the document. The conflicts must be resolved before you can save the document to the cloud.
In OneDrive sync client (OneDrive.exe), when a lot of users have synced a library, the sync is happening on all these machines at various times. Now, when there are any changes made in a file which is inside a folder, the sync client will not only sync these files but check for changes in all other files in the folder. During this time the OneDrive is in 'processing state'. Since there are multiple users syncing the same library, there is a high probability that there are other users on whose machine the same folder or file is getting synced. Whenever sync is happening for a specific file, the file remains in locked state, irrespective of whether you have made changes on the file or not. The sync client just sees that a file is being synced and in order to prevent a conflict it puts the file in locked state. During the same time, if another user syncs the same folder and files under it (which is happening in this case), it will show the above error, asking the user to merge or create a new file. This is how the sync client works and it is to prevent two people syncing the same file with different changes."
--> the larger the ‘collaboration’ the larger the chance of synchronization issues. Definitely not the quality I would expect from a Microsoft product, expecially not one that is presented as the best in team collaboration.

Workaround --> work in the online environment…
Is work being performed on a root-cause fix?
Another workaround would be to put as few as possible document in a folder to prevent the risk of synchronization errors when two users are viewing a document in the same folder…

Could you add a feature request for an ‘open read-only’ button?
I often only want to read something in a document, and based on your explanation if that’s a word document and I open it, it will trigger a synchronization check on that document as well as on all the other documents in the folder leading to the issues as reported, when another user might also be viewing a document in that directory.

Feature request would be to either: ensure that documents cannot be authored at the same time in cloud and in oneDrive (prevent synchronization issue), or at least allow an 'read-only' button, so that only reading a document will not result in a 'lock'.