Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 19: Working with Documents in SharePoint Products and Technologies 541
Check-In/Check-Out Processes
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services gives users the ability to keep versions of
documents and to check documents in and out.
About Document Versioning
!
Document versioning allows you to keep multiple versions of a document. This
functionality is not enabled by default. By enabling document versioning, if a
change needs to be reversed, you can restore the previous version and continue
working. A Version History command is included on the drop-down list users see
when they click the arrow next to a document name and on the toolbar in the Edit
Properties or View Properties page for the document. The Version History command
is also available in client applications compatible with Windows SharePoint Services,
such as Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, and Microsoft
Office PowerPoint 2003. When the user clicks Version History, a list of the previous
versions of the document appears. The user can open an old version, restore a version
(replacing the current version), or delete an old version.
Important When a file is deleted from a library, all previous versions are
deleted as well.
Versions can be created for all file types except HTML files that contain
images or embedded objects. If you want to create versions as HTML,
you must use the archive, or thicket, MHTML format (often saved as .mht)
when saving to this website. This restriction applies to other compound documents.
Although you can save several versions of a compound document—say,
a Microsoft Word document with a link to a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet held within a document library—the link within the Microsoft
Word document will always point to the most recent version of the Excel
spreadsheet and not to the version of the spreadsheet that matched the
version of the Word document at time of creation. If you want to match information
from several sources at a particular instance, you need to include
the content within one document and not link to it. In SharePoint Server
2001, compound documents were supported only in standard folders.
By default, picture and document versioning is turned off for the document
libraries that are created for each portal site area, Topic, and SharePoint site. You can
enable and disable versioning once a document library is created. When you create
a new library, you have the option of turning on versioning. This means that you
can turn on versioning for libraries that store important information and turn off this
feature for libraries that don’t need versioning.