The version state of a document may indicate its degree of maturity or the pertinent stage in a work process . For example, a document might first be characterized as a 'draft'. After an inspection, the state might be set to 'accepted' or later to 'published'.

The members of a workspace may agree on suitable version states for their work processes and enter them into the 'Version state' field. To facilitate work, BSCW provides a menu with three version states:

• experimental,
• stable,
• released.