Versioning supports a variety of workflow processes which vary greatly from organization to organization and may span days, months, and possibly even years. Irrespective of these organizational differences, a common requirement is the uninterrupted availability of a centrally located, corporate database to support daily operations. This level of availability has to be achieved without duplicating the data and without applying prohibitively restrictive data locks. Versioning offers the type of flexible data management framework that is required to meet these demands and can accommodate the most rudimentary workflow processes as well as the most complex.

Workflows generally progress in discrete stages, with each stage often requiring the allocation of a different set of resources or business rules to be enforced. Typically, each stage in the overall process represents a discrete unit of work, such as a work order. To manage these work units within a common administrative framework, each stage can be associated with a named geodatabase version.

There are several ways of applying versioning workflows in an organization, and different versioning strategies are available to GIS project and data managers to manage spatial data in a multiuser environment. The following explains these in detail along with their pros and cons.

Direct Editing of the DEFAULT version

Two-tier version tree

Surrogate DEFAULT version

Multiple-tier version tree

Fast Track versions

Cyclical version tree

Managing Historical Versions