SharePoint Document Checkout Issue – This document could not be checked out. The file could not be checked in.

I ran into a wee issue a few days back. On a fresh SharePoint 2010 farm, created a site and uploaded a few documents. Everything was working fine on my development server.

However when I sent the link to a few colleagues to test, they reported facing issues checking out, opening and generally editing documents from their browsers. On trying to checkout a file for editing, they were getting the error prompt stating permission or lock issues. Verified this wasn’t the case.

Then I tried to check out the same file from development server and check it in back in after editing from a desktop machine. Didn’t work for me either (and I was a farm admin!). The error this time was more confounding

After an hour of head scratching, turns out the fix is fairly straightforward. Just create a site collection on the root of the web application. Once you do, everything works as it should. Delete it and you will see the same issues.

Microsoft should definitely document this somewhere (I haven’t located it anywhere so far).