During a migration planning exercise for a departmental site on SharePoint 2007 to a new site structure in SharePoint 2010, I came across an interesting use of versions to store records.
The user had no version retention options set on some libraries because they didn’t want old versions removed as particular versions represented a signed agreement at a point in time. They may now be on version 8 for instance that had amendments but version 4 was the signed the original agreed version with the customer.
A most unusual way of using version handling and not advisable given that most SharePoint implementations would impose retention of a set number of major and minor versions to control storage space. The recommended approach would be to declare the agreed copy as a record, copy it to a records centre or create a PDF/XPS copy for later referral.
Moral of the story is if you are discussing version handling with your users be sure to point out that is to allow them to recall an old version for comparison or revert back to a version before unwanted changes were made and not as a record keeping process.
This also reminded of another record keeping faux par unrelated to SharePoint but where a senior exec had an Outlook rule to copy everything to Deleted Items on arrival, he would then move it back to the inbox if it required attention. An IT policy to clear deleted items on Outlook exit removed all his emails….
