Versioning update to Document Libraries in team sites in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

As an ex-MS I get frustrated when they do dumb-things, and with O365 releases this is more frequent than I'd like, but removing the ability to control versioning on libraries is out-an-out infuriating and idiotic move.

What this means to our content control and operational mgmt

Lets start in the basement...

Resetting version floor, and disabling controls on existing site libraries breaks all the business rules agreed and applied by organisations already in practice

Firstly each incremental version retained immediately adds to blow-out storage consumption across a site - because despite SP being able to handle differential updates on files Microsoft does not enable this on Office 365. 

Why? Well document size on avg is trending 20 - 50mb per item; images, PowerBI reports, GIS data-sets for mapping and videos are all into Gigs -  and SPO Modern UI notes every typed change in display-panel as a version - I can go on

[there's some real-world examples below for those interested]

Second is more insidious, Microsoft is forcing an organisation to bare an operational risk on unnecessary retention of information *after business rules have been put in place*.

The combination of this arbitrary increase of versions and change in control, coupled with AutoSave defaulting to on cause every document opened to be versioned and retained (unless specifically locked).

What this means Microsoft are putting your company at risk of breaching data-disposal rules for critical items - by reset modified dates and versions kept, forces items to now be included in available set of documents and content admissible in a discovery, or required to be handed over in event of a legal hearing. Thanks MS

Q: Who in Microsoft has contacted each company using their service, and got a written approval to change their retention policy and sign off the operational risk profile for the organisation?

Basic Storage Mgmt Examples

Simple working example 1: I upload load a short-video as .mp4 (~300MB).

In modern library ui I add

• a Title (v1),
• business function data (v2),
• select 3 publishing key-words - (v3 - 6),
• presenter (v7)
• and publish.

Total storage consumed is 7x 300MB = ~2200MB or 2GB.

Actual working project example : 

Project - average document turn-over in medium sized business change-mgmt project

• 500 - 700 items + evidentiary emails and comms.
• Approx. 68% of items are collaboratively edited
• avg no. versions in history 22 -but not retained
• Average size (Word = 28MB, PowerPoint = 60MB, Excel = 15MB, PDFs = 19.5MB, support content >100MB per item)

Project site setup

• 4 libraries, 
• Minimum of 6 metadata attributes added to items.
• 3 inherited automatically; 3 required in life-cycle stages
• library versioning tuned to 10 major vers, 8 minor;

FastForward: Apply this global reset to 100 versions, compound issue with applied Office AutoSave on by default...

Q: How long do think the increase we're getting will last?

The cynical side of me says this is an easy way to gouge for storage fees, because you can guarantee the tenant storage increase wont be sufficient with average file-sizes and Microsoft saving full-copy for every change in metadata.

I have other great examples where this combined with AutoSave would breach record controls, and create a massive legal risk to businesses

In short - this is beyond dumb.