How do I set up draft item security in a workspace?

In certain workspaces, specifically where you store regulated documents, you might want to set up permissions based on the documents’ versioning (a draft document or a published document), where visitors, with read permissions, will just see the latest published documents but members, with contribute permissions, will be able to see drafts that have not yet been published or new drafts of earlier published documents. This is possible to accomplish by applying a document library setting in SharePoint called “Draft item security” and needs to be done per workspace where these rules should apply. A prerequisite for applying this setting that you login to the workspace with a user account that has administrative permissions, preferably with an account that is a site collection administrator in the workspace. The instructions are:

1. Open the workspace’s SharePoint site.
2. Open the document library’s settings by clicking on “Site contents” on the left navigation, then clicking on the ellipsis (three vertical dots) and selecting the “Settings” option:
   
3. Under the “General Settings” section, click on the “Versioning settings” link:
   
4. In the “Draft Item Security” section, select the “Only users who can edit items” option:
   
5. Click on the “OK” button.

Note

1. Documents that have not yet been published are not discoverable through SharePoint Search when Draft Item Security is configured to Only users who can edit items. For documents that already have a published version, search results are based on the latest published version. Content added only to unpublished draft versions will normally not be searchable until it has been published.