Forum Discussion
Roger Gu
Microsoft
MicrosoftVersioning update to Document Libraries in team sites in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business
The announcement has been moved to New Updates to OneDrive and SharePoint Team Site Versioning.
- You can create a new document library and go to advance.
Select "No" to versioning Will we be able to use Information Management policies to remove existing versions and retain the final document for archive purposes? We'd like to offer this as an archiving solution for our users who may not want all previous copies of a final document. Thank you.
Roger GuI am not sure about the information management policies you mentioned. Depending on your scenarios, there are a couple of options I think:
1. if there is an approval process that contributors(users who upload and edit files) need to be involved, then why not just ask them to remove old versions.
2. if you want the library to have versioning off and contributors have no option to have versions(they need to make sure what they save is what they want to keep, no way to recover), you can either create doc libraries outside team site, groups and OneDrive for Business, or create a tool using CSOM to turn off versioning.- In essence you are confirming that:
Firstly - That there is no longer an option to chose and apply appropriate business rules, and that Microsoft is changing information and retention management policies (the business decision kind of policy, not your technical implementation kind) for all companies using this service
Secondly - customers now have to get a developer to build tools to re-apply a business decision (i.e. The appropriate level of versioning) on all new sites.
Q: Please confirm if this will be applied to sites running classic site templates or not?
In various articles I read about this, including this one, "all Document Libraries" eventually changes to "all libraries". Is this versioning going to strictly be limited to Document Libraries?
- Roger Gu
This change only applies to Document Libraries that are in Team Sites(both Groups-connected and not connected). In other words, other types of libraries or Document Libraries in other types of sites won't be affected.
Not sure I would agree with this assertion Roger, because fundamentally all libraries are based off the common root library template. Microsoft as deprecated and removed many of the branching variations of libraries over the last couple of years and have standardised on one multi-purpose library.
In new Communications sites and Modern Teams site templates you only have 1 library option available (until you re-enable or create a new one - which you can't do via the UI anymore) - so it's easy to say that it's likely to only be in site based on Modern site-template, but not guaranteed, because its the same root template as std document library in any site - including Classic site templates. So the options on global changes are script to a single set of specific site-templates (unlikely, because we know they will do at least 3 - communications, modern teams and OneDrive) *or* update the root app - which impacts all inheriting from it.
I suspect they'll go global, because its marketed as "enable great experiences"...
Mixed feelings.
If thinking of the main idea of protecting information and way of guarantee that users can't disable versioning and therefore we may always support them recovering data (great for onedrive), we have some use cases where we centrally disable (or reduce) versioning. For example, on the site assets library: This is where the default notebook is created, and we had several problems with big notebooks versioning.
Quotas fill up extremelly quicly in this case.
It's important that there is an easy way to manage versioning on sharepoint sites, groups and teams, or even disable it by the site owners. 100 versions is an aggressive number with high impact on quotas, let us at least specify tenant wide a minimum number of versions to enforce.
To keep our experiences great, we … will no longer support the ability to disable versioning or configure it to retain fewer than one hundred versions.”
--> It’s “great” to lose control of our existing environment! :(Given the way auto-save works would it be better to use Major and Minor versioning by default. That would increase the version capacity to account for auto-saves.
- Roger GuMajor/minor versioning is for publishing rather than the capacity of versions. Publishing a minor version to a major version is a workflow, that requires user's explicit action and may have specific permission requirement.
- Though I think you miss my point. Major and minor does not need a workflow. It generates capacity. Items like autosaves should be minor versions. Easy to purge a batches.
This is a significant issue for us, we have viable use cases and policies which support no versions.
Why are you enforcing technology on to business process? We do not plan on using apis.
This is bonkers, please reconsider before you disrupt and break things you have no business touching.
IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX
- What about OneNote files?
Thanks,
JasonOneNote is a tricky one because it has it's own versioning and controls, ignoring SharePoint really, and the file-format is a compressed series of XML files and folders presented as .one.
Suffice to say that you never have forced check-out on libraries with OneNote files, and its best practice to leave library versioning as major only (or completely turned off) on library it is in.
OneNote (and its content format) act like a wiki with instant last character save, and multi-user editing options - it does not understand the concept of publish major/minor versioning or strong document mgmt. controls.
[saying that I love OneNote, it's a fantastic app and works really nicely - as long as you let it do its own thing and don't try to override using SP DMS controls]
- Roger Gu
OneNote versioning works differently from other documents regardless the library setting, so this change won't affect OneNote.
I can't see how Microsoft have the right to amend a library versioning settings to a new default, IF the users have amended the value from the default to meet their specific needs.
We have a number of projects that have large files and in some cases the Project Managers have reduced the version limits to 10 to save space. That is their business decision.
Following this change will I need to notify all our Site Owners to re-review their Version settings (no small task for a company of 40,000 employees.
