As digital collaboration between mobile workforces becomes a reality for many organisations, Microsoft announced in May that it was rolling out a subtle but significant change to document versioning for both OneDrive for Business and for SharePoint Online.
The update will allow Office 365 business users to focus and cooperate better in such a collaborative digital environment, by accessing no less than a minimum of a hundred versions of every document residing in the cloud.
The change is justified by the increasing importance of document versioning in an online environment where revisions and updates are constant among various users and groups, and the creative process may require to access and retrieve previous documented and erased information quickly.
When versioning is enabled in the SharePoint list or library, business users can store, track, and restore items in a list and files in a library whenever they change. Versioning, combined with other settings such as checkout, enables more control of the content and data stored in the cloud.
All versioned documents are accessible via the online library where the documents are stored. Each version can be viewed, deleted, or restored to replace the current version (in the latter case, all changes will be lost.)
Maintaining several versions of documents can lead to faster project completion and increased productivity. However, documents residing in OneDrive or SharePoint could take up considerably more storage space than initially planned.
With the new versioning settings enabled, admins will have to adjust their storage space allocation accordingly to prevent any disruptions in operations. Fortunately, SharePoint Online per user license storage allocation has increased to 1TB plus 10GB per user license purchased to accommodate new software upgrades.
The document versioning update comes as just one of the many upgrades to Microsoft’s popular business productivity software to enhance digital collaboration in the cloud.
Find out more about document versioning here.
Office 365 integrates cloud, mobile, and social technology solutions to make your business more collaborative and productive.
