UPDATED 8/14/2018:
As we previously announced in MC138148, we will be providing an option to opt out of the versioning setting update. You can start opting out today using SharePoint Online Management Shell cmdlet provided later in this post.
Warning: by opting out, your Office 365 Tenant will not be able to take advantage of the upcoming version setting update, document library's versioning can be turned off by end users and documents lose the protection of version recovery.
If you would like to opt out of the versioning setting update for your Office 365 Tenant using SharePoint Online Management Shell cmdlet provided later in this post, you must do so by the end of September 2018. Otherwise, we will roll out the versioning setting update to your tenant in October 2018.
Command: Get-SPOTenant/Set-SPOTenant
Parameter: EnableMinimumVersionRequirement
Value: True - default value, opt-in to the versioning change.
False - opt out.
These commands require version 16.0.7918.1200 of the SharePoint Online Management Shell or greater. To download the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell, visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35588. After you run the cmdlet to change the value, please check if the value is set correctly by running Get-SPOTenant cmdlet.
UPDATE 7/18/2018:
Since this announcement, we have received feedback from our customers on this functionality and the timing. First off, thank you for your valuable feedback. We hear you and are making changes to accommodate different customer needs. With that said, we will be providing an option to opt out of the site versioning requirements. We will update this blog as well as the Message Center Blog when that becomes available so please stay tuned.
On May 15th we announced on the Office 365 Roadmap (ID 30544) that we’re updating the versioning settings on all OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online team site document libraries, including both group-connected team sites and team sites not connected to an Office 365 Group. We'll be gradually rolling this out to Targeted Release customers in early June, and the rollout will be completed worldwide by the end of July.
Protecting customer data is the most critical thing we do as a platform. In the lifetime of SharePoint Online, the most common form of data loss has been a result of un-recoverable changes; something that can be prevented by the versioning functionality. This feature is critical to undoing unwanted changes, and other recovery scenarios.
A few years ago, we enabled versioning by default and since then we have heard customers’ feedback that versioning can still be turned off by end users without fully understanding the implications. Some customers have even resorted to building custom tools to scan and keep versioning on for all the document libraries within their tenants.
To further protect end-user data, we will require versioning with a minimum count of one hundred major versions for document libraries in SharePoint team sites and OneDrive for Business.
What happens to my existing library settings on document libraries in SharePoint team sites and OneDrive?
Existing libraries that have versioning enabled but are set to retain fewer than one hundred major versions will be updated to retain the new minimum. Libraries already set to retain one hundred or more major versions will not be affected, including those with the default setting of five hundred.
Can I disable versioning?
With these changes, the document library settings page will no longer support the ability to disable versioning or configure it to retain fewer than one hundred versions. Developer APIs, however, will still allow for setting any custom retention count and disabling versioning, however for the reasons stated above this is highly discouraged.
This update may increase the number of possible versions saved for any document. With that said, earlier this year we announced plans to increase the SharePoint Online per user license storage allocation to allowing greater collaboration and storage capacity for organizations using Office 365 and SharePoint Online.
As stated earlier, we are rolling out this change to First Release users in June and the rest of tenants worldwide in July.
We have published this update to Office 365 roadmap and we will also update the Enable and configure versioning for a list or library support document when we start rolling it out.
As always, please feel free to provide feedback here or in our OneDrive UserVoice forums.
-The OneDrive Engineering Team
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