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grant_jenkins's avatar
grant_jenkins
Iron Contributor
Sep 02, 2024

New Co-Authoring Feature REMOVES Discard Changes

This post is more of an information for SharePoint users since Microsoft haven't announced the removal of Discard changes for pages / news posts as part of their co-authoring feature. This is a major regression and will cause a lot of pain to most of Microsoft's customers.

 

Microsoft have said that they are replacing Discard changes (as it's no longer required anymore - REALLY) with Undo and version history. The Undo button doesn't discard changes to a page. You can undo your changes, but the page will still be saved as a new version regardless. I've testing in my test tenant where the new co-authoring feature has been rolled out and I can NOT discard changes anymore.

 

Scenario (and an extremely common one)

We have flows (reviews, approvals, etc.) that run when a Page (Standard Page or News Article) is published. Now, if I go into a published page to check on some of the page layout and make some temporary changes (VERY frequent that this happens across all of our authors), it will save a version with my changes, and I am now forced to restore the previous version to remove my changes, which will inadvertently move the page back into Draft mode and need to be republished. Republishing it again will kick off another flow, and the page will now be published by the user that temporarily updated the page, and on the current date/time. We absolutely need our pages and news articles to keep the actual date they were published and display who originally published them (these are displayed on the page) and not kick off additional review/approval flows.

 

It will also affect our version history which we rely on for auditing purposes. Before, I could go in and help someone with their page and discard my changes, or our authors could just play around with the design of the page and not have any intention of keeping their changes. Now, those users will end up in the version history when they didn't actually have any intent on keeping their temporarily changes.

 

Love to get your thoughts on this regression. Especially since Microsoft seem to think it's not important, and have not posted any communications (general, M365 service announcements, etc.) about the removal of Discard changes.

SharePoint Online
  • AnoRnymous's avatar
    AnoRnymous
    Iron Contributor
    Sep 09, 2024

    grant_jenkins I wish this was an opt-in or opt-out feature. I think that in more than 90% of the cases co-authoring is not used on pages. We edit pages all the time to test changes or to check properties of web parts. But we don't want to have to republish the page, as it changes the edited by and modified date properties. Plus, news articles will be republished accompanied by new notifications, which will be confusing for users to say the least.

  • ddoty's avatar
    ddoty
    Copper Contributor
    Sep 10, 2024
    Yes not happy that the Discard Changes is missing. I am often going to my clients SharePoint sites and just want to show them how to do one or two things on there page for training purposes and it'd be great to get that 'Discard' button back so it's not my name on the 'last published by'.
    Also, it forces me to re-post news articles (which I believe alerts followers).
  • CriMac78's avatar
    CriMac78
    Copper Contributor
    Sep 17, 2024

    The common content manager spends his life editing pages in error or even testing something, even though he doesn't want to give effect to the change he made... It makes sense for this type of change to appear suddenly?=...

    • MSBardsley's avatar
      MSBardsley
      Copper Contributor
      Oct 01, 2024

      CriMac78 You can get back the "Discard changes" option by going to the Site Pages settings and then click on the "Versioning Settings" option and then select YES for "Require Check Out". Then select "Create major versions" for the Document Version History and then set Version count limit to 5000. The only side affect I found is associated with News items. My SPFx code invokes CreatePageFromTemplate.aspx and the page is not properly checked out and it will fail with an error. I am currently looking into a solution.

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