The announcement has been moved to New Updates to OneDrive and SharePoint Team Site Versioning.

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 mgmtLets 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 ExamplesSimple 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 project500 - 700 items + evidentiary emails and comms.Approx. 68% of items are collaboratively editedavg no. versions in history 22 -but not retainedAverage size (Word = 28MB, PowerPoint = 60MB, Excel = 15MB, PDFs = 19.5MB, support content >100MB per item)Project site setup4 libraries, Minimum of 6 metadata attributes added to items.3 inherited automatically; 3 required in life-cycle stageslibrary 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.

What is the reasoning behind making it impossible to disable versioning? I have quite a few use cases in which versioning is turned off ...

Wow, this adds to a recent line of "making business level decisions on behalf of customers". (Like trying to provision o365 groups for direct reports). I feel that should be out of bounds.I don't disagree with the idea, but like others mentioned you shouldn't change anything in my environment. You can change the defaults on NEW things. But many decisions have been made already based on that and there are business reasons in some cases for less than 100 including no versions.

It seems like this could cause a storage quota issue for team sites, and possibly ODFB users, with a large number of very large files that are updated frequently. I think site managers and global administrators should be able to limit the number of versions as they deem appropriate.

Totally agree, it's ridiculous to stop us from disabling version control or to set the minimum to say 10 major versions. There are situations where some libraries will contain large files and not necessarily Word documents. We don't want our storage space used up by these previous versions.Just one more headache to contend with when considering rolling out OneDrive to people, and give's us another reason to continue to use SharePoint on-prem.

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

44 Replies

Jeroen Lammens
Brass Contributor
May 16, 2018
What is the reasoning behind making it impossible to disable versioning?

I have quite a few use cases in which versioning is turned off ...
- Peter England
  Brass Contributor
  May 17, 2018
  Totally agree, it's ridiculous to stop us from disabling version control or to set the minimum to say 10 major versions. There are situations where some libraries will contain large files and not necessarily Word documents. We don't want our storage space used up by these previous versions.
  Just one more headache to contend with when considering rolling out OneDrive to people, and give's us another reason to continue to use SharePoint on-prem.
  - Brent Ellis
    Silver Contributor
    May 17, 2018
    Wow, this adds to a recent line of "making business level decisions on behalf of customers". (Like trying to provision o365 groups for direct reports). I feel that should be out of bounds.
    
    I don't disagree with the idea, but like others mentioned you shouldn't change anything in my environment. You can change the defaults on NEW things. But many decisions have been made already based on that and there are business reasons in some cases for less than 100 including no versions.
Deleted
May 16, 2018
Got to agree with this, and honestly, I think the defaults should be set higher with Auto-Save in the fold it doesn't take long to fill up that 500 :P.
- VasilMichev
  MVP
  May 16, 2018
  Absolutely agree with that, the amount of versions generated by AutoSave is simply ridiculous. Goes to show you how much the dev team actually uses Office applications...

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

44 Replies

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