Approval workflow and document control

Question

I am currently working with a sharepoint consultant to develop an intranet with document and version control. One of the main parts of the system will be the workflow to approve new or updated documents.

We have a process that essentially goes like this:

Author>Head of Department (approver)>release

We have asked that when the document is rejected at approver stage the version number rolls back to the current live version instead of having the iteration numbers but we have been told it's not possible.

This seems like it must be a fairly common issue and must have been dealt with before. Has anyone done this or can anyone explain why it isn't necessary to do that?

Answer 1

You should be able to set your document library in such a way that users are only able to see approved documents.

Also, there can be multiple unapproved versions that currently exist so rolling back every unapproved document may lead to more issues. This also allows the author to make any changes after a document is rejected so that it may get approved later. Otherwise, you can always delete the rejected version or leave it unapproved.