Automatic versioning is capital no matter the way to access the
documents. Automatic versioning is actually part of the whole SW
development process and, logically applies to documents, as it applies
to SW source modules. Robust versioning systems, like
Rational Clearcase
used as a SW Configuration Management
(SCM)
system in NMS/NMS for Data since 1991, provide automatically unique
version numbering. These numbers cannot be overridden by users.
Needless to say, these version numbers should be considered as a
facility to unambiguously point at uniquely available documents
versions.
Automatic versionning is not implemented by MS-Word, which rather provides a manual versioning system implemented in file names offering no protection of the data at all. This implementation is not satisfying and should be totally rejected as bad practice. Worse, it cannot be disabled.
Furthermore, ClearCase provides many useful features like displaying of differences between versions of the same document. Unfortunately, editing tools may not directly be compatible together enough to ensure full implementation of this feature. Netscape in particular is not compatible with the HTML standard, since it implements its own extension, as well as has bugs in the generated HTML (bad nesting).
Differences between versions of the same document are not implemented by MS-Word.