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

Microsoft
44 Replies
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.

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...

What is the reasoning behind making it impossible to disable versioning?

 

I have quite a few use cases in which versioning is turned off ...

So does versioning still count towards site quotas and used space against the overall SP quota?

 

While i agree, the autosave has hit the versioning counts hard, i dont agree with Microsoft forcing versioning on, or forcing the number to 100 (especially if you have it set lower)... make the minimum an option an admin can set at the very least... unless this doesn't count towards my space allocations.

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.

Thanks for all the feedbacks. 

 

We understand customers may have their scenarios where versioning needs to be turned off. We will continue to support it through CSOM APIs. The ability to configure the versioning settings does not change.

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.

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 may be helpful to also reference the recently announced Storage increases to license bundles. 

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Increase-in-SharePoint-Online-storage-allocat...

Today we are announcing a 20x increase in the SharePoint Online per user license storage allocation. This will increase to 1 TB plus 10 GB per user license purchased, up from 1 TB plus .5 GB per user license purchased. Note this does not include SharePoint Online kiosk plans including Office 365 F1 and Microsoft 365 F1

Not sure I agree with this. We have had a recent experience with versions of large media files causing the quota limits on one of our libraries to be breached. It also means paying for more storage than we would like.

Thanks James, this does reduce my concern with this change a bit... but raises the question of why this change is storage space didn't go onto the O365 admin message center. I had no idea this was happening, and i watch the message center daily, and come to this site occasionally.

 

With that said though, i still dont want Microsoft changing settings i already have in place. If they want to role this out and change defaults thats fine by me (given the storage change), but dont touch my existing settings, and dont take away my ability to turn it off all together if i choose to in the GUI.

Doesn't seem totally right. It would be OK to change the defaults for new libraries. It would be good to allow a tenant admin to switch that on for all libraries in a said tenant with one button. But just changing it for everyone might be a disaster.

I can sense "Purging sharepoint library versions with PowerShell CSOM" will have its 5 minutes in popular google searches...

While I can see the technical and support-focused rationale for making this change, I have to agree with the others here who have said that this is an overreach by Microsoft: it encroaches into an organization's ability to make business decisions regarding content management.

 

Fine, ensure versioning is turned on in new libraries by default and up the default number saved to 100.  But don't set the floor at 100, and don't restrict the ability to turn off version history to an API trigger.  This will hurt content managers' ability to configure according to business need, and would obscure the ability to understand the full configuration of an otherwise standard document library when examining its settings.

In my organization, we've had a lot of issues with co-authoring documents when version settings are set low. This is a huge plus along with the recent increase in storage capacity.
The auto-save frequency needs tonned down a bit, that thing will save a cursor move sometimes. That would help a lot as well.

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.

Hi Jonathan,

 

Is it not changed that it only increments with the changes and not the full size anymore? 

Else i completely agree with your statement. But i thought this changed.

 

This is not agreeable. We are a small non-profit, and increasing the limit to 100 is an overkill.

 

OTH I am also unable to understand why the version is bumped when a document is opened? When I open a document from a synced folder on my PC, just to view it, and then close it, it saves it and version bump occurs. The site then shows the history as me having edited the document and people start calling me on why did I change it, when I haven't actually. This is getting insane. 

 

Also, could someone help me understand how minor vs major versioning occurs on auto-save?

Technically you are correct (and I should probably amend my posting to reflect the following) - Shredding and differentials were introduced in SP2013. It is enabled in the database. SPO shows and provides full details as though item in the versioning and history is complete item - hence storage reporting in version history and on site-dashboard reflects equiv. of full copies retained.

 

Unfortunately your storage quota reflects this usage too *not* actual data-storage (I did some checking on last year to be sure of what is saved vs what is shown).  What is happening is a disconnect in representation *and* behaviour of the apps dealing withe the documents :(

 

..I'd already written a large entry - I didnt want to muddy waters with long detailed waffle on actual vs registered on reporting.