How to use SharePoint for document control
- Dan Hawtrey
- 4 November 2024
With so many of us relying on documents in our daily work, document management is a critical activity for many organisations. One element of this is to have strong control over particular sets of documents that employees rely on such as policies and procedures, or product overviews. It is imperative that these documents are controlled so they are accurate, up to date, easy to find and trusted by employees. This is particularly the case in regulated industries where compliance and related processes demand effective document control.
Most organisations that have Microsoft 365 use SharePoint for their document management. Even if they have an additional document management system (DMS), SharePoint ends up as their de facto document management system because of its high levels of use.
SharePoint has lots of excellent features to support document management, but it is less than ideal if you want to control a set of documents such as policies. In this post we’re going to do a deep dive into how to establish effective document control with SharePoint by using an additional document control solution such as Xoralia.
What is document control?
Document control can be defined as the practices, processes and solutions that an organisation needs to put in place to effectively manage a set of documents so that those documents fit particular criteria, such as being accurate, up to date and readily accessible.
Why are controlled documents so important?
Documents are central to the way organisations and employees work. Every day we:
- Access documents to guide our work.
- Create and update documents as output from our role.
- Find documents that we need to consult or reference.
- Disseminate and distribute that others need to read.
- Save multiple versions of different documents.
With so much of what we do revolving around documents, most organisations invest time and resources in trying to better manage their documents. As part of this, controlling a set of particular documents will be extra important. These are usually documents that need to be relied upon at any one time by employees as an essential reference to support operations, ensure compliance, reduce risk and underpin customer service.
These documents are controlled in the sense that they must be managed in such a way that they are:
- Accurate.
- Up to date.
- Accessible.
- Findable.
- Actionable.
- Security-trimmed.
- Only have the latest version available.
What are typical types of controlled documents?
Typical collections of controlled documents include:
- Policies and procedures.
- Guidelines.
- Product descriptions or manuals.
- How to guides.
- Document templates.
- Contracts.
- Standard presentations.
- Brand assets.
- And more!
Challenges in managing controlled documents
There are many challenges associated with managing controlled documents that are commonly felt across organisations.
- Establishing central trusted places to access controlled documents
- Most employees want to have one or two easily accessible places to find controlled documents such as policies, where they are confident that they can find most up-to-date version. But establishing this – particularly in a SharePoint environment with multiple sites and where there are many different departments and teams involved in creating policies – can be extremely challenging.
- Poor findability
- Ineffective search, inadequate navigation, closed systems, scattered SharePoint sites and controlled documents being in multiple different repositories can make it extremely difficult for employees to find the controlled documents they need. Poor findability wastes everyone’s time but also results in documents being ignored.
- Multiple versions of documents in circulation
- A core problem with controlled documents is having multiple versions in circulation, often because employees revert to versions that have been sent via email or are stored on file shares. Sometimes there can even be multiple versions found on a company intranet.
- Having multiple versions of controlled documents causes confusion, erodes trust and ultimately means employees use documents that are inaccurate or out of date, leading to a number of risks.
- Getting people to read and act upon controlled documents
- Controlled documents such as policies are important but they’re not always the most engaging content. Getting employees to read controlled documents is far easier said than done, and even then, it is very difficult to know if they have actually read them or will take on board any required actions. You can also cannot report effectively on who has read a document.
- Document lifecycle management
- Every controlled document has a lifecycle from the time it is created to when it is revised and eventually replaced. But each document needs to be controlled at different stages of the process, and many of the features that support that aren’t available with SharePoint out of the box.
SharePoint’s strengths for document control and management
SharePoint has a number of document related features, and many organisations rely on SharePoint as their main document management system (DMS). These features include:
- Flexible document libraries for easy access and distribution.
- The ability to add custom folders and metadata to enable findability.
- Microsoft and SharePoint’s powerful search capabilities.
- Highly granular access control to ensure documents are appropriately security trimmed.
- Seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.
- In-built version control.
- Microsoft’s enterprise-grade security.
- Support for accessibility.
- And more!
While these SharePoint features are good at supporting a broad range of document management activities, they are not enough to establish the effective management of controlled documents. In fact, if you are using SharePoint out of the box and want to establish a central collection of controlled documents it is very likely that you will encounter some of the challenges we have already highlighted.
SharePoint’s limitations for effective document control
Despite SharePoint’s strengths around document, it is absolutely not an example of document control system software. In fact, there are a number of specific issues using SharePoint straight out of the box that make it hard to use for controlled documents, and almost impossible to achieve at scale. Without additional software it is very difficult to achieve document control best practices for SharePoint.
- Multiple missing features
- SharePoint out of the box simply doesn’t include many of the features that you need for effective control of documents and specific areas such as policy and procedure management. There are no employee attestation features, convenient lifecycle management tools for document owners, specific views aimed at particular roles such as managers, and so on. To set these features up will take significant effort, development costs, in-house technical knowledge, time to market and more.
- Decentralised governance
- SharePoint by design supports a decentralised approach to document management, empowering different teams across the business to share documents in ways that work for them. While that approach is useful for some day-to-day work, it makes it difficult to provide controlled documents for users in one central library; what tends to happen is that controlled documents are spread over multiple sites and document libraries, making it even harder for employees to find what they need.
- Lack of automation
- Effective management of controlled documents requires a lot of moving parts. Using SharePoint out of the box means a huge manual effort to coalesce document and policy owners to keep their collections up to date, notify employees about changes to documents, onboard new employees and check they have read it, create reports and more. Of course, all of these can be automated, but that requires a lot of set-up and is also dependent on some of the features that are missing that you would find in a document control product like Xoralia.
Enhancing SharePoint with Xoralia
Xoralia is a flexible document control solution that is often used to manage and disseminate collections of controlled documents. Many organisations use it as policy management software for Microsoft 365.
The great advantage of Xoralia is that it is actually built on SharePoint meaning that it can:
- Integrate seamlessly with your existing SharePoint and Microsoft 365 environment.
- Keeps all your data and content within your Microsoft 365 tenant meeting your existing security, compliance and governance policies.
- Can leverage all the existing capabilities of SharePoint, but make them better, for example so you achieve more effective document version control with Xoralia.
- Helps you make the most out of your existing investment in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, supporting better ROI (Return on investment).
- Will enable a wide range of benefits such as improving policy management in Microsoft 365.
However, the beauty of Xoralia is that it enhances SharePoint by:
- Adding multiple ready-to-go features that support managing controlled documents that simply aren’t available in SharePoint Online out of the box, including employee attestation capabilities.
- Ensuring you can establish the central control and governance that helps to manage controlled documents involving multiple different owners, and also create a central point or points for employees to access collections of controlled documents.
- Acting as document lifecycle management software by adding relevant features that help owners keep documents up to date.
- Adding automation to reporting, notifications and more to save huge amounts of time, again not possible with SharePoint out of the box.
- Providing structured views and searches to increase the findability of controlled documents.
Xoralia features that transform SharePoint document control
Below are just some of the key features of Xoralia that transform document control using SharePoint.
- Central controlled document or policy library
- Xoralia establishes a central policy library or portal where everyone can easily search for and find the controlled documents they need, while also viewing any personalised tasks in relation to mandatory reads, employee attestations or even keeping documents up to date. The sheer convenience of a central place for controlled documents supports productivity, establishes trust, and drives accountability, enabling effective control of documents using SharePoint.
- The additional useful “Collections” feature also allows you to present disparate documents together in a central library, even though that are actually located in different SharePoint sites.
- Reporting, tracking and dashboards
- Xoralia makes managing and disseminating controlled documents that much easier with all the reporting and tracking options you need to ensure that people read any required documents. A number of role-specific dashboards are also engineered around different role needs – including individual users, people responsible for documents, team managers and central administrators.
- Mandatory reads and employee attestation
- Xoralia includes full support for mandatory reads via an employee attestation process where a user must confirm they have read and understood a controlled document such as a policy. Granular reporting allows you to track progress and send reminders in order to ensure high levels of attestation; some Xoralia customers have reported 99% compliance. Employee attestation is extremely important for compliance and onboarding processes and is not available with SharePoint out of the box.
- Additionally, Xoralia’s Quiz Builder feature has the ability to create custom quizzes for employees about the content they are digesting, ensuring the main points are understood or a change has been truly digested.
- Search and browsing
- You can have effective document management in place that supports controlled documents, but it’s largely pointless if employees than cannot find the documents they need. Microsoft’s search capabilities are powerful, but employees want and need a more structured search and browsing experience to locate an individual document. Xoralia underpins excellent findability through custom metadata that allows users to browse for or filter their search using meaningful keywords to find exactly what they need.
- Notifications and reminders
- Xoralia comes with in-built notifications and reminders. These can be viewed within Xoralia but also through email. These notifications are automated, so you don’t need to waste huge amounts of time sending off reminder emails, supporting effective workflow automation for compliance purposes.
- Document lifecycle management
- SharePoint out of the box won’t join the dots around the lifecycle of a controlled document. Xoralia includes features for every part of the document lifecycle:
- Tools for creating a policy with custom workflow, enabling an automated document approval process.
- Automated reminders to document owners to review the document at regular intervals.
- Reports for document owners so they have a clear view of their responsibilities and upcoming tasks.
- Strict version control for updated versions of documents.
- Archiving policies.
- SharePoint web parts
- One unique feature of Xoralia is an ever-growing collection of highly flexible web parts that provide targeted views and features to enable convenient access through your SharePoint intranet or site to meet the needs of end users, document owners, managers and more. These web parts give you unprecedented opportunities to configure access to controlled documents that result in an excellent user experience. Here flexibility is key. Customers tell us they value the ability to achieve customisable policy management in Xoralia.
- Audit trails and document traceability
- Controlled documents relating to compliance such as policies require features to support audit trails and document traceability, so you have a record of who did what to reflect strict document controls. Xoralia has the compliance features that you need.
- An active product roadmap
- Xoralia has an active product roadmap with new features supporting document control being added all the time. Customers can also request and influence features to be added. Xoralia keeps up to date with the Microsoft 365 roadmap while also taking into account emerging organisational and employee needs.
What are the benefits of using Xoralia for document control?
Using a comprehensive product like Xoralia to support controlled documents has multiple benefits.
- Bring proper and scalable document control to regulated industries
- Effective document control is a must-have for regulated industries for compliance, operations and more. It is essential that employees have access to accurate, authoritative, trusted and up-to-date policies, procedures and related documents. Investing in the right product is a no-brainer. You can achieve effective and scalable document management with Xoralia.
- Easy access to policies at the time of need
- Employees need to be able to successfully find the right policies and documents at the point of need – to check a process, to solve an issue in real-time, to complete a task, and so on. Enabling easy access to policies drives compliance, reduces risk, increases productivity and more.
- Transform findability
- Having a centralised place where employees can find controlled documents such as policies eliminates the problem of poor findability. Employees can find what they need, reducing time-wasting, frustration or relying on out-of-date documents.
- Increased compliance and related reporting
- With a solution like Xoralia you are able to track and report accurately on areas such as employee attestations, ensuring compliance-related documents are read and understood. This not only leads to increased compliance, but you also report on it to third-party regulators and certification bodies.
- Reduced administration overhead supporting productivity
- Xoralia’s features and automation massively reduces the administration involved in establishing and managing controlled documents. No returning to the madness of manually sending out hundreds of emails and updating spreadsheets.
- Improved employee onboarding
- Employee onboarding invariably requires new starters to read controlled documents. A product like Xoralia is excellent at supporting onboarding with the ability to present a collection of onboarding documents, associated employee attestation, views for managers to track progress and more.
- Improved customer service
- Contact centre and customer-facing staff need access to accurate product and services information that is also easy to find. Xoralia removes the barriers to enable real-time access to help answer customer queries and resolve issues.
- Communicating changes
- The combination of Xoralia’s employee attestation features, targeted views and notifications can help communicate changes in key policy documents, as well as embed behaviours. This is one of the most difficult areas of managing controlled documents to achieve success.
- SharePoint and intranet adoption
- Employees often cite access to controlled documents such as policies and procedures as something they want to see from their intranet or SharePoint site. Xoralia delivers this through a central policy library which can be directly integrated into your SharePoint intranet or SharePoint site, contributing to overall adoption in the process.
- Builds trust in controlled documents and a culture of compliance
- Xoralia helps make all your controlled documents easier to manage and more visible. This means these documents become far more trusted as employees know they are the very latest versions. Document owners also take their responsibilities to keep documents up to date more seriously. All this helps to build a culture of compliance, particularly in regulated industries.
What are some of the real-world use cases for controlled documents?
Having effective document control is important for all organisations, but it especially critical for regulated industries impacting not only compliance but operations as well. There are a wide range of compliance tools in regulated industries – Xoralia can be a great choice to cover document control.
Real-world use cases of document control with Xoralia include:
- Having effective health & safety documentation for a manufacturing firm which must be followed to prevent accidents. This helps reduce risks of accidents which are hugely damaging not only to anyone involved, but also leads to reputational damage, compliance and regulatory issues. Organisations can find themselves spending a fortune on manufacturing document control software, but Xoralia can provide an equally effective and more reasonably priced option.
- In financial services it is critical that accurate and up to date product and services information is given to clients, otherwise it can result in accusations of mis-selling, regulatory issues and more. Financial services document management can be challenging, but Xoralia provides all the features you need to make it a success.
- Compliance is critical across multiple areas of the pharmaceutical industry, from the marketing and selling of drugs to how clinical trials are carried out. Documentation on all these areas must be carefully controlled and managed.
- Healthcare is an industry where critical procedures must be strictly followed, otherwise it can impact patient care. Subsequently healthcare document control and compliance is a major focus for those business functions supporting clinical staff. Any documentation that underpins critical procedures again must be actively controlled – there is no room for compromise. Solutions such as Xoralia can help you achieve document control.
Achieving SharePoint-based document control
SharePoint out of the box is not a platform for effective document control. Xoralia can act as an effective Document Management System for SharePoint, helping you manage controlled documents throughout their lifecycle.
If you’d like a demo to see how Xoralia can help you as a compliance and document control software solution, then get in touch!
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
