To
change the versioning settings for a list or library, open the list’s
or library’s settings page by switching to the List ribbon or Library
ribbon and clicking the List Settings or Library Settings button. At
the top of the page that appears, under the General Settings section,
click the Versioning Settings link.
In the versioning
settings page, you can define how the list or library creates versions
for list items or files. This page is different for lists than for
libraries because documents and list items behave differently.
Set the Versioning Settings for a List
The first setting for versioning in a list is whether content approval is required (see Figure 1).
This option is not strictly about managing versions of the list item
but rather about the publishing process for a modification to a list
item. If you select this option, every time a modification is made to a
list item (or when one is created), the list item is not displayed to
all users automatically. Instead, the list item gets an approval status
of Pending, and no one can see it except its author and people who have
permissions to view drafts in the list—until a person with the
permissions to approve items in the list approves that item, thereby
changing its status from Pending to Approved.
The next section is
Item Version History. Here, you can define whether versions should be
tracked for the list and how many versions should be kept. This second
option is optional, and you can leave it unlimited if you want to.
Finally, if you set the Require Approval option, you can also limit the
number of approved versions to keep.
The last option on this
page, Draft Item Security, is also valid only if you chose to require
approval. It lets you define who can see draft items that have not been
approved yet. The options are any user who can read items in the list,
only users who can edit items in the list (who might need to be able to
see the drafts to edit them), or only the people who can approve items
in the list (which is the minimum required because they must be able to
view the drafts to approve them).
Set the Versioning Settings for a Document Library
The versioning options for a
document library are almost identical to those of a list. The only two
differences are explained here.
As shown in Figure 2,
the first option that is different is that, instead of just selecting
that the library should store versions, you can select how versions
will be stored: either as major versions (which is how lists behave) or
so that any change will result in a new version (changing the version
number from 1 to 2 to 3, and so on).
This setting does not
enable you to specify that a certain change is not major enough to
warrant an increase of the version number for the document. For
example, if you change a document by spell checking it and correcting
the spelling or updating the date it was last printed, this change
might not be important enough. This is why you might want to choose the
option for major and minor versions, which allows users to decide
whether the change is major, thereby increasing the version number by
1, or minor, thereby increasing the number after the decimal point for
the number.
The second option that you
can configure for document libraries only is the Require Check Out
option. Selecting this option can help reduce conflicts when several
users want to work on the same file. This option forces users to check
out a file before editing it by automatically checking out the file for
them and preventing others from editing it. This way, users can’t
forget to check out a file but start to work on it without realizing
that another user is also working on the same file.
Note
It’s important to remember
that when the Require Checkout option is selected, uploading multiple
documents adds those documents as checked out, and they are not visible
to other users until you check them in.
There is no automatic check-in of
a file because SharePoint cannot know when the editing is done and the
user is ready to check in the changes. Users therefore must be aware of
this fact and get used to checking in files and not keeping them
checked out forever.
