Lifecycle lost, document disappears in WP 5.2.5 SP2!

After some changes to the content server configurations in a multi-content-server environment intermittent weird issues became consistent. An author would try to edit an Active document and the document would disappear from WP.

Investigation revealed various things over time, as summarized below:

• The document was successfully checked out and a new version was created
• The new version still showed the lifecycle and state to be the same as the Active version
• The version label WIP disappeared from the Active one and was not placed on the new version
• Messages showed “checkout successful” but “failed to clean up temporary object”
• The ACL wasn’t changed to the expected one

Research on user groups and support forums revealed that there was a major known bug in WP 5.2.5 SP2 which resulted in the behavior described above. Even though it was related to inheriting ACL from User or Folder, that configuration setting alone could not fix the problem. SP3 fixed the bug partially while SP4 fixed it completely.

Why wasn’t the problem detected in QA? One possibility – QA had 5.2.5 SP5!