Today we begin our SharePoint series, with the goal to share useful insights and tips with you on how to store and organize data, as well as on collaboration. Let us know what you like and which topics we should cover in more detail or in future.

We start with a powerful feature you are hopefully already using:  versioning! If you don´t, it can easily be enabled and configured in the library or list settings by those who have the rights; if yes, let us make sure, that we make the most of it.

Why is it recommended?

Versioning not only allows you to undo changes or mistakes e.g., by viewing or restoring older versions, it facilitates transparency over changes and collaboration and helps to keep a library streamlined and organized.
On most of the SharePoints we can nowadays still discover relics of the old fileserver and folder structure days, when changes and versions were often realized by adding version-, change information or Initials to the filename. Often numerous files were created, with different and non-self-explanatory names, possibly stored in various subfolders without providing the overview.

What does it do?

Versioning creates a new version of the file and the entry in the version history, whenever you hit the save button; if autosave is enabled, this happens automatically every few minutes. In both cases, only if there was a change in the file or its metadata.

How can I use it?

When you open the menu of a file on SharePoint by clicking on the three dots that appear when you mark a file or hover over it and open version history, you can see when the file was changed and by whom, its size and by default, the comments that can be written, when a file is checked in again.

Note: check out/check in files on SharePoint: you should only enable this feature for a library when files need to be edited exclusively by one person. When you check out a file, no one else can make changes, until it is checked in again, to prevent that anyone else does changes parallelly (exception: “override check out” available for site or library administrators). This can be useful for formal and sequential processes (e.g., edit/review/approve), but not for real time collaboration.

By hovering over or clicking on the date and time the version was last modified a dropdown opens with the option to view or restore this version.

Note: restoring/delete a version on SharePoint: restoring will create a new version. When you delete a version, it will be moved to the recycle bin. Deleted versions will disappear but the version number of the remaining files will not change, also for transparency.

You are now all set and to collaborate, easily get an overview on changes, view or restore previous versions and keep your filenames, list, and libraries tidy.