Document Version Governance

Version governance is the discipline that 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 rather than several, a rule for what happens to predecessors, and enforcement that survives people copying documents to convenient places. The last is why governance at the retrieval layer matters more than governance at the storage layer — copies proliferate regardless, and what determines the answer is which one the system will return.

Centralpoint governs at the retrieval layer: index membership follows record lifecycle, so only the authoritative version is reachable through the governed surface regardless of how many copies exist elsewhere. For an AI assistant that is decisive, since a model has no basis for preferring one of four retrievable versions and will cite whichever ranks highest.