Sharepoint 2013 : Health Monitoring and Disaster Recovery - Maintaining Content Integrity (part 2) - Versioning

Versioning

Document and page versioning is another way in which users may self-maintain integrity of their content in SharePoint. Library owners may enable versioning on a list or library so that when users with collaborative permissions upload changes, SharePoint keeps track of the version history. SharePoint library versioning is not new to SharePoint 2013; Microsoft introduced it with WSS 2.0, and it comes in two flavors:

• Major version numbers
• Major and minor version numbers

Major and minor version numbers tie into the publication status of a document item. A major version in the format of xx.0 constitutes a published version, meaning that it is available to all users (including anonymous if the site allows anonymous user access). A minor version number, in the format of xx.1-9, constitutes an intermediate revision, and only the owner of the document, users with approval permissions, and site owners may see the latest changes.

The following steps detail how to enable versioning for a document library:

1. Navigate to your SharePoint site or subsite.
2. Navigate to the default view of the document library.
3. Click the Library tab on the ribbon.
4. Click the Library Settings icon on the ribbon.
5. Click the Versioning Settings link.
6. SharePoint displays a page like that in Figure 5.

   

   Figure 5. Enable versioning in a document library

7. Under Document Version History, select the desired versioning type.
8. Select the maximum number of draft and major versions to keep.

On the Version Settings page (Figure 5), you may have noticed the other options, to enable content approval and require check out before editing. These options also allow you to maintain the integrity of your content.

Enabling content approval turns on the parallel approval workflow, which requires one or several approvers (in the approvers security group) to approve changes to content before SharePoint publishes the content to a major version.

Requiring users to check out content before editing ensures no two users can overwrite each other’s changes. Of course, this limits work to a single thread, and only one user can make changes to a document at a time. Furthermore, there is nothing preventing one user from checking out a document indefinitely. Microsoft introduced co-authoring to address the need for multiple users to edit a document at the same time.