Is there an easy way to swap a rigged character for an updated one? I have a character that's in a scene and I didn't like how he was weight painted and some anatomy needed to be tweaked, now it looks better than before. But I edited the model from its own file where it's just the character and not from the scene he is in. I was thinking there must be a way to update the old model to take over with the new version, considering it's not unusual that when there's a collaboration effort there's a need to update an asset. 

Is there something for that kind of situation in Blender? 

Manually, it ends up being a real challenge, copy, paste, parent, unparent, unbind, bind. I'm still trying to get it done, so far Blender crashing, not getting something done in the right order having to start over. Parts moving when unbinded as it was moved when binded. Now the fingers aren't bending as the modifiers are in the wrong order. Still at it. It's a real headache.
Okay, say you have a main character file complete with rig and extra shapes for your bones. Save your rig and character as a group, and then close.

Open your Scene file, and choose Link from the File menu. Browse to your character file, go to Groups, and choose the group that represents your character.
Once in scene, while selected, choose Object>Make Proxy and then choose your rig name from the menu. This will allow you to then use your rig in pose mode and key frame the bones, while protecting your character mesh from changes. Make your changes upstream in your character file and reopening your scene file will pull the changes in.