Sorry for the delay in posts, but I have
been struggling with the type of content I want this blog to provide. After my train ride to work this morning I
was approached by gentlemen with some SharePoint questions since he saw that I
was reading a book for an upcoming certification exam.
His question was simple in that he wanted
to know how to enable Check in / Checkout, how versioning worked, how to turn
it on, and its benefits. I realized that
these posts don’t have to be the most technical as long as I am able to help
people.
I will first explain how to activate the
features & then the ideology behind them.
How
to Activate Check In / Check Out
1.
Navigate to the library you
would like the check-in / checkout activated
2.
Select Library under Library
Tools
3.
Select Library Settings
4.
Select Versioning Settings
5.
Select the Yes Radio Button
next to “Require Check Out”
6.
Select Ok
a.
You now have the Check In /
Check Out Feature!
How
to Activate Versioning
1.
Navigate to the library or list
you would like to have versioning
2.
Select Library under Library
Tools or List under List Tools
3.
Select Library Settings / List
Settings
4.
Select Versioning Settings
5.
Select “create a version each
time you edit an item in this library / list
6.
Input the number of versions
(explained later in the post)
7.
Select Ok
a.
You now have the Versioning
Feature!
Explanation:
From this point on in the article I will be
discussing some of the benefits and caveats of activating these features.
Pros
& Cons of
Check in / Check Out
Pros:
·
Avoiding other users modify
your files
·
Preventing multiple users
edit the same file at the same time
Cons
·
Users have to remember to
check-out documents before editing and check-in after finishing
·
If a user forgot to
check-in a file, other users cannot modify that file but they still can view
it. Only admin can check-in the file if necessary
·
For documents just uploaded,
their state is checking out, the user has to check-in them. Otherwise, other
users cannot see them
Versioning
Versioning is a great tool, but versioning
has the capability of eating up allot of disk space due to the way files are
saved. In 2010 an entire file is saved for
each version of the document. To put it
in perspective, if you have one file with 10 versions you essentially have used
the space of ten files. When you
multiply this out by 10 files with 10 versions each, you now have taken up the
space of 100 files. There are a plethora
of benefits though with versioning such as major and minor version, version
history, and being able to review past versions. Check with your SharePoint administrator on how
many versions they would recommend based on your infrastructure.
Microsoft has addressed this space issue in
2013 with “Shredded Storage,” which can be a misleading name. Shredded Storage is a huge benefit of 2013
since rather than saving the entire file as a new version, it will only save
the incremental changes.
2010
2 versions of a file at 4 megabytes = 8
megabytes used
2013 with Shredded Storage
2 versions of a file at 4 megabytes with an
updated paragraph = 4.00001 megabytes used.
Note:
Shredded storage only affects Microsoft
Product Documents and will not work for documents such as PDF etc, these will
be versioned as they were in 2010.
I hope this clears up any confusion on this
topic and thanks again for reading!
Dan
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