Major / minor versions best practice - MOSS 2007 document library

Question

By default minor versions (draft) do not appear in the search, I'm aware it is possible for the items to appear in the search. We have a requirement where minor changes are made to documents and therefore need to be published as such for example a document that is version 2.0 and has a small changed made to it should be published as 2.1. I'm concious that if we make the draft items available in the search we may be going against best practice as well as how SharePoint was intended to be used.

What do you think?

Answer 1

The only way to get draft versions to appear in the search results is to grant contribute access or full access to the search crawler account! But I would never recommend this for security reasons and because it would also break the whole concept with minor/major versions.

You will simply need to publish minor changes as major versions! It is no problem to publish many versions over time. If you worry about storage costs then consider configuring your document libraries with a limit to the number of old versions stored.