Note
Changing the name of a list or library does
not change the link to that list or library. The link stays the same,
but the title that is displayed changes.
2. Change the Versioning Settings for a List or Document Library
Scenario/Problem:
You want to change how a list or library deals with storing versions
for documents and list items. For example, say that a document library
was created with versioning turned off, and you want to turn it on. Or
say that a library was created and configured to have versioning but not
to support automatic check-out of a document when a user opens a
document for editing, and you want to change that.
Solution:
To change the versioning settings for a list or library, you open the
list’s or library’s settings page by switching to the List ribbon or
Library ribbon and clicking the List Settings or Library Settings
button. At the top of the page that appears, under the General Settings
section, you click the Versioning Settings link.
In the versioning settings page, you can
define how the list or library creates versions for list items or files.
This page is different for lists than for libraries because documents
and list items behave differently.
Set the Versioning Settings for a List
The first setting for versioning in a list is whether content approval is required .
This option is not strictly about managing versions of the list item
but rather about the publishing process for a modification to a list
item. If you select this option, every time a modification is made to a
list item (or when one is created), the list item is not displayed to
all users automatically. Instead, the list item gets an approval status
of Pending, and no one can see it except its author and people who have
permissions to view drafts in the list—until a person with the
permissions to approve items in the list approves that item, thereby
changing its status from Pending to Approved.
FIGURE 2 The Versioning Settings page for a list.
The next section is Item Version History.
Here, you can define whether versions should be tracked for the list and
how many versions should be kept. This second option is optional, and
you can leave it unlimited if you want to. Finally, if you set the
Require Approval option, you can also limit the number of approved
versions to keep.
The last option on this page, Draft Item
Security, is also valid only if you chose to require approval. It lets
you define who can see draft items that have not been approved yet. The
options are any user who can read items in the list, only users who can
edit items in the list (who might need to be able to see the drafts to
edit them), or only the people who can approve items in the list (which
is the minimum required because they must be able to view the drafts to
approve them).
Set the Versioning Settings for a Document Library
The versioning options for a document library
are almost identical to those of a list. The only two differences are
explained here.
As shown in Figure 3,
the first option that is different is that, instead of just selecting
that the library should store versions, you can select how versions will
be stored: either as major versions (which is how lists behave) or so
that any change will result in a new version (changing the version
number from 1 to 2 to 3, and so on).
FIGURE 3 The Versioning Settings page for a document library.
This setting does not
enable you to specify that a certain change is not major enough to
warrant an increase of the version number for the document. For example,
if you change a document by spell checking it and correcting the
spelling or updating the date it was last printed, this change might not
be important enough. This is why you might want to choose the option
for major and minor versions, which allows users to decide whether the
change is major, thereby increasing the version number by 1, or minor,
thereby increasing the number after the decimal point for the number.
The second option that you can configure for
document libraries only is the Require Check Out option. Selecting this
option can help reduce conflicts when several users want to work on the
same file. This option forces users to check out a file before editing
it by automatically checking out the file for them and preventing others
from editing it. This way, users can’t forget to check out a file but
start to work on it without realizing that another user is also working
on the same file.
Note
It’s important to remember that when the
Require Checkout option is selected, uploading multiple documents adds
those documents as checked out, and they are not visible to other users
until you check them in.
There is no automatic check-in of a file
because SharePoint cannot know when the editing is done and the user is
ready to check in the changes. Users therefore must be aware of this
fact and get used to checking in files and not keeping them checked out
forever.
