SharePoint 2010 WCM Highlight Changes Between Page Versions

I was recently asked is version comparison feature in SharePoint 2010 that will show you the actual differences highlighted. My initial answer was no; but I was thinking about documents. For instance, if you have version control set up for a document library and you have Word, PDFs, etc. in there you will not get that capability. But you can access the major and minor versions and compare as you need (or use track versions like in the MS Word document).

However the question posed to me was around Web Content Management (WCM). A new feature of SharePoint 2010 is versioning of the web parts. So if you are doing publishing, the publishing pages will support showing differences between versions. Check this out.

Here is a simple publishing page from a demo environment that I have.

Now here is a view of the publishing page versions. Here you see the differences between version two and three and that I put in “This is a test”.

Even more interesting, here are two screenshots that captures the differences between versions 1 and 2. Notice, that the changes that are captured are not just the content in text field I had on the publishing page, is shows all of the differences of all the metadata fields. In here I made comments, I added an image, added a bunch of new text, and I changed some of the metadata fields.