Can I prevent others from deleting or disabling an edit history in my shared OneNote notebook?

Lehner Manfred 1 Reputation point
2021-12-26T19:34:54.423+00:00

I want to share my OneNote notebook with my team for editing documents together. However, my concern is that everyone can edit and delete everything without leaving traces in the document: Can I prevent someone I share my notebook with from disabling the edit history function or deleting an existing history or deleting previous page versions?

OneNote Management
OneNote Management
OneNote: A family of Microsoft products that enable users to capture, organize, and reuse notes electronically.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
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  1. Emily Hua-MSFT 27,526 Reputation points
    2021-12-27T07:32:11.09+00:00

    Hi @Lehner Manfred ,

    Welcome to Q&A forum ~

    Based on my tests, currently, we are unable to prevent others from deleting or disabling an edit history in shared notebooks if you give the edit permission to them. Thanks for your understanding.

    To delete or disable the history of notebooks, we need to go to OneNote desktop client > History tab > History group.

    • From the perspective of OneDrive sharing files:
      If you assign the permission such as 'Full Control', 'Design', 'Edit' and 'Contribute' to others you share with, then they could click "Open in desktop App", and then have the chances to do above actions.
      If you only give them the permission like 'Review', 'Read' and 'Restricted View', then they can just open notebooks on OneNote for web that can not delete or disable the history of notebooks.
    • From the perspective of the OneNote:
      There is no group policy or setting to remove or greyed out the options under History group on OneNote desktop client, such as "Delete All Versions in Section", "Disable History for This Notebook".
      Unless all users in your organization use OneNote for Windows 10 which is an UWP app that does not have the relevant options to delete the edit history.

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  2. Lehner Manfred 1 Reputation point
    2022-01-18T14:52:52.42+00:00

    I have found that under "Recent Edits" the edits remain visible even if I have disabled and deleted the "Edit History". (But it is not clear to me, for example, how I can display deletions of text passages).

    In any case, that means the edits will continue to be recorded in the background even under "disabled edit history".
    How long will they be stored?
    Is there any way to permanently save these edits recorded in the background?
    Is there any way to save these edit records in an exported "onepkg" file?
    Is there any way to use these edits recorded in the background to create an edit history?
    Is there any way to delete these edit records as well?

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