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Variation system force checkin, the bottom-up approach

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Variation is one these features that you need to be careful playing with in SharePoint. It requires understanding the mechanism and its internal working parts. Hence, the lack of such level of understanding will result in undesired behavior.

Problem

One of the problems I have faced with my clients is the "Variation System Force Checkin" problem. It all started when a site admin browsed his/her site and found that his changes to the page were lost and and the page is acting weird! He ran to the version history and found out that his/her changes became older version and the system admin checked-in the page forcefully. of course the blame may come to system administrators that they were the ones who forced the checkin.

Explanation

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The figure above explains what happens when a page is created in the source site "A" and approved, it will be pushed to the other sites "B" and "C" (other languages).

Now, what happens when you approve a page in the source site with version 1.0. Then, it will be copied to destination sites for translations. during translation the destination page will checked out to the translator. What if the source publish a newer version 2.0 of the same page. Of course, with this automatic behavior a newer version will be pushed into the destination and the current ones will be force to checkin with an automatic comment from sharePoint "Variation System Force checkin" and a newer version is added to the version history.

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