What is Document Version Governance?

Version governance prevents an estate from holding four copies of a policy with no indication which applies. It requires three things most estates lack: a single authoritative location, a rule for what happens to predecessors, and enforcement surviving people copying documents to convenient places. The last is why governance at the retrieval layer matters more than at the storage layer — copies proliferate regardless, and what determines the answer is which one the system returns. Centralpoint governs at that layer: index membership follows record lifecycle, so only the authoritative version is reachable through the governed surface however many copies exist elsewhere. For an AI assistant that is decisive, because a model has no basis for preferring one of four retrievable versions and will cite whichever ranks highest.