Sitecore Lock and Versioning

Sitecore offers a nice way of version controlling your content editors. To enable, simply change RequireLockBeforeEditing  to true in your configuration. However you may wonder how it works and when it will create a new version. 

When a content editor checks out the item to begin editing, Sitecore will create a new version of the item as long as: 

• You are not an Administrator user
• The item is not in FINAL workflow state
• Must belong to a workflow

The 2nd point is something to keep in mind as I've had scenarios where I've created a non published page and an editor came in afterwards and overwrote my changes. The changes were not correct but I had no way to roll back as I left the item in a DRAFT state. Since the item was not in a FINAL workflow state, the new version of the item never gets created.