SharePoint: Office client integration errors when no root site exists

There are multiple symptoms that can arise when there is no root site in a SharePoint Web Application. 

• When checking out an Office file from SharePoint 2010 using the drop down (Edit Control Block) the following error shows:
  "This document could not be checked out. You may not have permission to check out the document or it is already checked out or locked for editing by another user"
• In an Office application when you choose File | Save As and attempt to navigate to the SharePoint Site the following errors may occur:
  “File Path Not Found”
  or
  “Document Not Saved”
• Users open Word documents from a MOSS 2007 server using Word 2010 running on Windows 7. Once the document opens in Word, File | Save As points to the Libraries\Documents folder on the C: drive. It should point to the location it was opened from which is the SharePoint Document Library. This means that the file cannot be saved directly back to the server. Users must instead save it locally and re-upload it to the MOSS 2007 document library.
• Open a OneNote 2010 file from a SharePoint 2010 document library and type in the section or new page. Manually sync or wait for the automatic sync. Close the OneNote file and reopen it from the SharePoint 2010 site. The changes made initially are not synchronized to the OneNote 2010 file within the SharePoint document library.

These errors are caused by not having a root site in the SharePoint web application.

For example, you have a site at http://www.contoso.com/sites/Test (http://www.contoso.com/sites/Test) , but there is no site at http://www.contoso.com (http://www.contoso.com/) (the root of the web application).

This happens because the above-mentioned scenarios (and many others) depend on web service or other RPC calls that get made to the root of the web application.  If there is no root site, these calls cannot succeed.

Create a root site for the web application:

1. Go to Central Administration | Application Management | Create Site Collections.
2. Select the problem Web Application (Example: SharePoint-80)
3. For the URL, set it to http://<YourHostName>/ (http://%3cyourhostname%3e/) (Example: http://www.contoso.com (http://www.contoso.com/) )
4. Make the other site collection settings as needed and click ok.

Having a web application with no root site collection is not supported in SharePoint.  See the following KB articles for more details:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2590564 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2590564)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2012229 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2012229)

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