Acme has a manual in which the topics were updated for a new release, without earlier versions of the content being made re-publishable. Acme now wants the ability to republish this manual for different earlier versions.
Acme's requirements
Solution
Use the variant functionality to retrospectively create variants for an object. Use this method if you have already updated a topic's content but now want to go back and recover each change to the content, making the different versions of the object available for publishing.
The History option in Author must be enabled, as you will need access to the object's archived history records.
When using this method you are reversing the normal work flow associated with variants. To reverse the work flow, you must use the object's history to create a variant for the current content, then use the history records to revert the primary object to an earlier version.
At each step of reverting the content in the primary object, continue by creating a variant, so long as you always finish by reverting the primary object to the earlier version.
Note: When creating new variants, you can only revert the history records from the group's primary object.