Cooperation in a shared workspace may mean that documents are edited by several authors and revised repeatedly. If the authors used standard documents, they would have to take care of a lot of administrative chores to manage the succession of documents and to maintain a history of the changes from one document to the next. As a safer and more comfortable alternative, the authors might put their BSCW documents under version control.

The contents of a document under version control are not simply overwritten, but each time modifications are made, a new version is created as the current version.

The earlier versions are preserved; their sequence identified by version numbers (e.g. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 etc.). You may access them via the document's info page (see section 4.6.2) or directly via a URL with a version number (see section 4.8.5).