10 must-have features for corporate policy management software
- Dan Hawtrey
- 29 January 2025
Today many organisations are choosing to implement corporate policy management software that makes policy management both achievable and scalable across the enterprise.
Successful policy management enabled by effective enterprise software:
- supports essential compliance and related reporting.
- enables employees to find the right policies at the point of need.
- minimises the risks associated with having out of date and duplicated policies in circulation.
- encourages busy policy owners to be accountable and helps them keep policies up to date.
- eliminates manual effort and much of the admin around policy management, with software doing the heavy lifting to save time and costs.
- helps to standardise policy management across large and distributed organisations.
- Better integrates your policy management into your digital workplace and the daily flow of work.
A successful policy management solution achieves all of the above by having several essential overarching qualities as well as a number of must-have features. These capabilities are often at the centre of requirements for policy management teams and IT functions looking for enterprise policy management software.
10 essential overarching qualities for corporate policy management software
Successful policy management is often a game changer for organisations looking to ramp up compliance, standardise policy management and get employees to follow key policies. The corporate software that facilitates successful policy management usually has the following essential qualities:
- Easy to use: intuitive and well-designed interfaces and features that make it easy and effortless to use for employees.
- Easy to manage: equally intuitive for policy administrators and policy owners with interfaces, features and views that reduce the effort around admin and policy management.
- Scalable and flexible: can flex and scale to meet the specific needs of your organisation both now and in the future as they change.
- Compliance-ready: ticking all the necessary boxes to support compliance efforts with additional features and reporting that can satisfy your legal, regulatory and auditing requirements.
- Highly secure: meeting all your IT security requirements, possibly delivered through Microsoft 365 and Azure integration.
- Seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365: full integration within your Microsoft 365 ecosystem including with SharePoint and Teams to provide policy management in the flow of work, while also taking advantage of Microsoft 365 features.
- Feature-rich: a wide and expanding set of different features to meet the needs of employees, policy owners and admins.
- Leverages automation: uses automation where possible to support greater efficiency, while reducing time and effort.
- Supports personalization and targeting: supports the creation of personalized and targeted experiences, notifications and more to drive relevance.
- Continuously improves with an active roadmap: supported by a vendor with an active roadmap so the product gets better and better and incorporates new technologies including AI.
10 absolute must-have features for enterprise policy management software
As well as these wider qualities, a strong policy management solution will need to have a number of specific features to really make a difference. Here’s our view of ten of the most important, all of which can be found within Xoralia.
1. An easy-to-access central policy library
Usually at the centre of any successful policy management solution is an easy-to-access central policy library that all employees can reach effortlessly, for example through a convenient channel such as a SharePoint intranet. This central library provides a single place that acts as one source of truth for policies, SOPs, guidelines and other controlled documents and becomes the trusted go-place where employees know they will find the very latest versions of all these documents. Just having this a central library in place is a game changer for policy management.
2. Search capabilities including custom filters
Superior policy management software increases the findability of policies through the addition of strong search capabilities. Xoralia, for example, leverages the power of Microsoft Search and provides the ability to apply search filters using custom metadata that make sense to your users. These filters can include groups, department, features, locations and other keywords. These powerful search features reduce the time employees spend in finding the policies they need and removes much of the frustration associated with fruitless searching.
3. Policy lifecycle management features
One of the challenges of corporate policy management is ensuring that owners actively manage their policies through their lifecycle and keep them up to date. A good policy management solution comes packed with features that support lifecycle management and help busy policy owners; these include elements such as “due for review” flags, automated notifications for when a policy is up for review soon, and personalised dashboards which show upcoming tasks relating to policies. Features like document version control, review approval workflow and more also result in effective policy management.
4. Policy creation tools
A comprehensive policy management platform should also provide tools to support the creation of new policies, conveniently within the platform. Xoralia helps do this in a number of ways:
- tight integration with Word to support writing the policy.
- forcing different groups to use a particular policy or document template to encourage standardisation.
- applying approval workflow to ensure the policy is reviewed appropriately before publication
- ensuring a policy is published to the right place, for example to a particular SharePoint library, and then displayed straight into the Xoralia central policy library.
5. Targeted views and dashboards
Policy management involves a number of different roles – policy admins, policy owners and policy reviews or approvers. Additionally, there are also end users and line managers who might have to ensure their team is reading and acknowledging different policies.
A good policy management solution will come with targeted views and personalised dashboards that include an overview of the salient information that a particular role needs to see. For example, the extremely useful “line manager dashboard” within Xoralia provides an overview of the compliance of all team members with any overdue tasks noted. This helps managers to ensure their teams are up to date with mandatory reads and compliance.
6. Notifications
Having notifications to remind employees, policy owners and policy reviewers of any upcoming mandatory reads, employee attestation or policy review tasks is an absolute must-have feature for any policy management solution. Within Xoralia some of these notifications are automated so you can effectively “set and forget”, simultaneously reducing the manual effort involved in policy management and increasing compliance. Notifications can be sent by email but also surfaced through personalised views within Xoralia.
7. Mandatory reads and employee attestation features
Nearly all organisations – and particularly those in regulated industries – will have policies that are mandatory for employees to read; this might be as part of an onboarding process, as part of an annual confirmation process or when a critical policy changes substantially. Often organisations need to track and report on employees reading and even confirming that they have understood policies.
Mandatory read and employee attestation features helps organisations achieve all of the above. These work by letting employees know the mandatory policies they need to read and when by and then providing a way for an employee to confirm they have read and understood the policy through an electronic signature. Within Xoralia there is the additional ability to add custom quiz questions to test for understanding. A robust solution like Xoralia then tracks all the completions to track success and also to make any necessary off-line interventions, leading to regular success rates of over 95%.
8. Measurement and reporting
A robust policy management solution needs in-built analytics to support improvement, including tracking the progress of employee attestations. Xoralia has a range of analytics built into targeted dashboards for employees, managers, policy owners and admins. The ability for a solution to integrate with Power BI can also enable sophisticated, custom dashboards that brings in additional data from other sources and systems.
9. Compliance tools
A good enterprise policy management solution needs to be compliance-ready with the necessary features to support your compliance process and any necessary scrutiny from external third parties such as regulators or certification bodies. Features includes audit trails, robust document version control, the ability to restrict access to administrative roles, employee attestation reporting and more!
10. Flexible web parts for Microsoft 365 integration
A common problem with some policy management tools and governance software is that is sits outside the normal flow of work and away from the applications where people spend most of their working day. This can impact adoption and value. One of the advantages of a SharePoint-based solution like Xoralia is it can seamlessly integrate with your Microsoft 365 ecosystem; this means it can be accessed via Teams or through your SharePoint intranet.
Xoralia has a unique feature in that it comes with a wide set of ready-to-deploy and highly configurable widgets (web parts) that can be very easily deployed into your SharePoint intranet or site and can instantly provide a user-friendly window into your policy management software, meeting different use cases such as searching for policies. There are also equivalents for Microsoft Teams. This essential policy management software feature always proves to be highly popular and actively supports the better adoption and findability of policies.
Features make the difference for policy management
Policy management software is a relatively mature market and there is a lot of choice. That’s good news for policy teams, but it is essential to pick the right software for your needs. If you want an effective solution, then ensure it has the essential qualities and must-have features that we’ve outlined in this article!
The story behind Xoralia
Xoralia was built by the team at Content Formula, an intranet and digital workplace consultancy that has built SharePoint intranets for some of the world’s most famous companies. Now, most companies want their policies and procedures on the intranet but they don’t just want to store them there, they also want tools to help better manage them. Over the years we came across just about every single requirement for a policy management system. As this article above explains, there are gaps in SharePoint and so we never built what in our mind was the perfect policy management system.
However, one of our clients challenged us to build something for them that filled all the gaps but still used SharePoint at the back end. We had a great relationship with them and agreed to share the budget to do this, provided we could then market the solution to others. That was in 2019. We’re now on version 3 of Xoralia and the product has grown and evolved a lot.
3 benefits you can expect from Xoralia
Make it easy to find policies
Centralised policy library with powerful search and filtering
Reduce administrative burden
Automations and notifications so that all policy tasks are carried out on time
Demonstrate compliance and best practice
Sophisticated tracking and dashboards to drive and measure compliance.
And lots more!
What our clients say
Xoralia drives user engagement and compliance...
The platform's user attestation functionality has been particularly impactful, leading to a remarkable increase from ~50% to 86% in user attestation within a matter of weeks.
Rian Stuart, IT Manager, Twinstream
...simplifies our policy management...
It not only simplifies our policy management, but also enhances our overall compliance posture and has proven to be a significant time-saver for our organization.
Nadja Friedrichs, Vice President of HR, Boyum IT
...single source of truth and access for employees...
We successfully rolled out the tool with a minimal internal learning curve and achieved a 97% read / acknowledgement rate on our first assigned policy.
How to get started with Xoralia
Step 1: request a demo
Fill out our form and we will be in touch to arrange a time. You can even book a time yourself.
Step 2: get a price proposal
If you think Xoralia is for you ask us for a quote. This will set out any options you may have.
Step 3: install and launch
We’ll install Xoralia in your environment (or you can do it yourself). We’ll provide training and support to get you up and running quickly
Here's what you'll get
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Central policy library
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Search and filter tools
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Mandatory read policies with attestations
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Quizzes
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Notifications and alerts
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Employee dashboard
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Line manager dashboard
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Works on mobile, in Teams and SharePoint
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New policy creation workflows
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Policy update workflows
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Review and approval gates
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Policy version history
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Compliance dashboard
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Audit trail
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Full reporting
And last but not least:
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Professional implementation service and support
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Evergreen software – frequent updates and improvements
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Comes with our "it just works" support warranty – we’ll fix any bugs, often before you even notice
Ready to get started?
Connect with us to streamline your policy management and ensure effortless compliance.
Perfect policy management solution for Microsoft 365 users.
I highly recommend Xoralia to any organisation seeking a robust and user-friendly policy management solution.
Xoralia seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365, particularly with SharePoint and Teams, aligning perfectly with our company's daily workflow..Rian Stuart, IT Manager, Twinstream