If you have used Enesys RS Data Extension for building reports that deal with item versions, you certainly know that this is a time consuming process. The main reason being the limitation of the SharePoint Web Services API in that specific area.

To somewhat mitigate this problem, Enesys RS Data Extension 3.5 made it possible to limit version retrieval to specific fields. Before version 3.5, it was an all or nothing option: version information would be retrieved for all selected fields. This approach provided a performance boost for scenarios like when you just need to retrieve “comments” history.

Version 3.7, goes a step further and takes advantage of the SharePoint Object Model to provide dramatically improved performance.

The following table provides performance comparisons between current version 3.6 and the coming 3.7 version. It is based on a query that retrieves 500 items from a list, each item having 4 versions.

| | Version 3.6 | Version 3.7 SharePoint integration mode | Ratio | | | ------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------- | ----- | --- | | 500 items Retrieving version from 9 fields | 3min10s | 18s | 10x | | 500 items Retrieving version from 1 field | 38s | 7s | 5x |

As you can see, the results show significant performance improvements. It will be much more convenient to report from Issues or Project tasks histories and provide analytical insight.