SharePoint Use Cases

08 Jul, 2008

Versioning Hell – Part 1

Posted by: Toni Frankola In: SharePoint  Bookmark and Share

One of the key features of SharePoint is versioning. But if not planned correctly versions can become your nightmare on a SharePoint project. During project planning phase perform requirements analysis on versions and once implemented educate end-users on how to use versioning correctly.

Versioning is a very good feature but Office documents can be huge so it is a good plan to limit the number of versions you want to keep in your document libraries.

Lesson 1 – Setting versioning limits

This lesson is very important, and, as a SharePoint consultant, you must know this by heart [:D]. It will also be useful for the following posts in this series.

You can restrict number of versions in following ways:
1) You can limit the number of major versions
2) You can limit a number of major version that will have minor versions
3) You CANNOT limit a number of minor versions to keep for a major version

versions1

Lesson 2 – Reaching version limit

When you hit your version limit the oldest version will be deleted. If major version limitation is set to 3, the following will happen when you publish version 5.0

versions2
Before
versions3
After

In next post I will try to explain the most common questions you will be asked about versioning by end-users on a SharePoint training.



Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint

Comments

1 | Versioning Hell – Part 1 - Sharepoint Use Cases

October 3rd, 2008 at 12:34 pm

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[...] Hell – Part 1 This blog has moved. Click here to open the new [...]

2 | Eman

October 3rd, 2008 at 12:36 pm

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Dear Toni

There have been lots of discussions regarding document versioning in our department.

I’ve heard that SharePoint keeps entire documents in past versions rather than just the delta, as done by some other versioning tools.

Is that true? This can quickly consume disk space in a big company or department even if we limit the version tree as described in the blog.

3 | Toni

October 3rd, 2008 at 2:05 pm

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I think you have to correct information. Sharepoint stores the complete copy of each version into database. It was probably designed in such a way because old binary formats were hard break into deltas. I do not know if there is any improvements with Office 2007 formats.

On a large implementation I would suggest limiting the number of versions to keep. If that will not be sufficient for you, you might wanna consider Enterprise Vault (http://www.symantec.com/business/enterprise-vault). It is a very good archiving software for Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange.

If you have any questions please feel free to drop me a line,
Toni

4 | Tweets that mention Versioning Hell – Part 1 | SharePoint Use Cases -- Topsy.com

April 7th, 2010 at 12:31 am

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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by train_boy, Ted Spalding. Ted Spalding said: Versioning Hell – Part 1 | SharePoint Use Cases http://is.gd/bicWc [...]

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Real-life use case and opinions about collaboration, CRM and web technologies and stuff by Toni Frankola. More...

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All postings on this blog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. All entries in this blog are my opinion and don't necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer.

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