I wish I could help more, but (as far as I can see) there are only two options:
- R is installed and maintained in a standard way on all computers. This means there's an administrator, so it's only possible if you have an IT group willing to do it or are willing to do it yourself.
- Everyone agrees to write programs for the latest versions of R and any packages. If somebody doesn't have a package, they install it. If they're behind in versions, they upgrade. Upgrading packages is easy with
install.packages, and upgrading R is almost painless with the installr package.
If you go down the admin route in #1, there's a lot of good discussion on keeping everyone compatible in What are the main limits to R in a production environment?. About halfway through the discussion, solutions for "version problems" are discussed. It's a lot of great info, so I won't copy it here.