Version Control

Your documentation should be polished, professional, and always up-to-date. This means that your documentation should always be open to improvements. But not all changes to your documentation are immediately ready to be seen or used. Dozuki’s Version Control feature allows you to control which changes are visible to your users.

With Version Control, changes made to a guide—whether a reworded sentence or a couple of new steps—can be grouped into an unpublished new version of the document. When you are ready for these edits to become visible to all users, simply deploy a new version of the document. In addition, Version Control also allows you to archive past versions of a guide—so you can revisit and restore previous editions of your documents, making it easy to keep careful track of your guide’s history.

Once changes on a guide are ready to be deployed, you must save this new version of the guide.

First, view the guide. At the top of the guide you will see a grey bar with a drop-down menu. This drop-down menu lists all the previous versions of a guide—and the current, unpublished version is called “Head”. To add the new version of the guide, select “Head” and then click “Publish Version”.

Once you click “Publish version” you will be prompted to fill out the Title, Publish Date, Release Notes, and Major/Minor Version fields to complete your deployment.

It is important to give your guide a title that identifies which version it is. The “Title” field is where you would indicate what version your guide is. It is most common to title each version numerically. For example, the first version is “V.1”, the second version is “V.2”, and so on.

Use this field to indicate the date and time that the new version of the guide will be published.

To have it published immediately, leave this field blank, or click on the box and select the current date on calendar and simply click “OK” when prompted to enter a time.

To have it published in the future, select that day on the calendar and enter the time you would like it to be published when prompted.

Use the release notes box to describe the changes that you have made to the guide since the previous release. These release notes can be seen when viewing this version of the guide from the dropdown menu, so it’s important to include things that will help identify this new version of the guide.

This allows users and approvers to quickly view a summary of the changes without having to view the entire document.

Use this field to indicate what type of changes you are making to your guide—for instance big changes, like adding a new step would constitute a Major version, and small changes, like fixing a grammatical error, would be a Minor version. The size of the release will be indicated next to it in the drop-down menu.

This selection will also determine which Approval Process your new version will be sent through before being published. You can assign a different process for each the Major and the Minor release options. For more information about document control, review the Approval Processes Overview Page.

Was an inaccurate edit accidentally published? Or did something that has changed get changed back again? Have no fear. Version Control allows you to easily revert back to displaying an older version of your guide.

Simply go to the “History” tab of the guide that you would like to revert. Click on the version of the guide that you would like to revert to, and then click “Revert to this version”. The guide will now appear as that selected version.

You can view which of your guides are up-to-date, have unreleased changes, or are unpublished using the Version Control Management Page.