How to automate policy governance in SharePoint for compliance

Dan Hawtrey
23 March 2026

Compliance failures are expensive, and manual policy management is just a slower way to fail. For organisations using Microsoft 365, SharePoint is a critical application that employees rely on to find, access, share, update, and manage documents. It is usually the de facto document management system (DMS) for day-to-day work.

Despite this, when it comes to policy management, SharePoint is often underused or not used at all. It rarely fulfils its potential as the single source of truth for corporate policies and procedures:

Policies and procedures may sometimes be managed and housed in a different compliance system altogether, making them harder to access and find.
Policies sometimes have to be copied over to SharePoint for employees to access, creating more than one version.
The distribution of policies within SharePoint is haphazard and inconsistent, creating problems with version control, findability and trust.
Policy management in SharePoint requires custom development to extend the necessary governance to manage policies, leading to additional cost, effort and technical debt.

A missed opportunity: using SharePoint for policy management

The disconnect between SharePoint use as a popular DMS and not using it effectively for compliance automation represents a massive missed opportunity. When done well, it means organisations can get better ROI from SharePoint, reduce compliance risk, achieve permanent audit-readiness, and improve the employee experience without adding another system.

SharePoint offers several key advantages for policy management.

Built on solid foundations

SharePoint offers several key advantages for policy management.

Easier access for employees

Employees require effortless access to policies and procedures at the point of need and within their day-to-day workflows. They should not encounter barriers to accessing and finding policies, and certainly should never have to authenticate into a third-party solution.

When policies are stored in SharePoint, employees can find them through single sign-on (SSO), Microsoft Search, Microsoft Teams, a SharePoint-based intranet, and even on mobile devices.

Better access means employees find and follow policies more readily, directly supporting compliance.

Reducing cost and complexity

Many organisations, especially those in regulated industries, choose to invest in GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) systems that provide a suite of tools to support compliance. These tools can play an important role and have value, but often there is a policy management module that is included that is:

Basic in terms of its features.
Offers a poor experience for users who cannot easily find or access policies.
Does not or has limited integration with Microsoft 365.

Running a separate policy management system alongside SharePoint creates its own problems:

Policies get added to SharePoint for easier user access, but often these must be copied, creating duplicates and version control risks.
There are effectively two document management solutions in operation, leading to additional complexity for users, extra management effort for administrators and additional costs.

Security and standards

One of the advantages of Microsoft 365 is the box it ticks around your security and privacy policies, which also helps to achieve relevant certifications such as ISO 27001. It’s no wonder that many IT teams try to keep as much of their data within their Microsoft 365 tenant as possible. However, with another GRC or legacy solution in place, your data may sit outside your tenant, or it may even be on-premises, which comes with its own unique set of frustrations.

Automation and reporting

Policy management typically involves painful manual administration: chasing reviews by email and tracking attestation in spreadsheets. SharePoint’s native integration with the Microsoft Power Platform changes this. Power Automate handles review workflows automatically, and Power BI delivers on-demand compliance reporting.

Copilot integration

Policies, procedures, SOPs, and guidelines are critical reference points for decision-making and for getting things done. They provide a rich and vital source of information for employees. These are exactly the kinds of documents that should inform Microsoft Copilot, but this may not be the case when they sit outside SharePoint.

Beyond access, Xoralia serves as the verified policy layer for your Microsoft 365 AI tools, ensuring that Copilot surfaces only current, acknowledged policies. Conflicting or outdated policies don’t just create compliance risk; they directly undermine the accuracy and trustworthiness of AI-generated responses across your organisation.

Why SharePoint falls short for policy management out of the box

Despite those advantages, several significant gaps stop organisations from using SharePoint effectively for policy management.

Feature gaps around SharePoint policy governance

SharePoint is not purpose-built for policy management. It lacks the out-of-the-box governance controls, automation features, and user engagement tools that compliance teams require.

SharePoint is designed to decentralise control, putting document ownership in the hands of teams across the organisation. That works well for general collaboration, but policy management requires central oversight and consistent governance.

In practice, this creates significant feature gaps:

No out-of-the-box employee attestation feature where users confirm that they have read and understood a policy.
No out-of-the-box, optimised reporting to meet compliance requirements around showing user engagement with policies, as well as elements such as audit trails.
No straightforward controls in place to manage and standardise policy management at scale across a distributed population of policy owners and authors.
No tailored automated governance and policy lifecycle management features.
No central policy library feature which is optimised to different policy management roles – compliance teams, policy owners and users.

Search and findability

A persistent problem with SharePoint-based policy management is findability. Policies are technically searchable through Microsoft Search, but in practice, they are hard to find because:

There is no meaningful metadata added to policies, so search is not optimised, and custom filtering using familiar terms for employees is not possible.
Policies are usually not found in one place, instead spread over different sites and document libraries belonging to multiple owners.
Permissions to view documents may be variable, so not everyone might have access to the policies they need – this can be an issue for some groups, such as frontline employees.
The lack of governance applied to policies means there are often duplicates, multiple versions of policies and no uniform approach to naming policies, which fills both the search with “noise” and makes it hard to know if the right item has been found.

Gaps in review workflow

SharePoint has no built-in review automation for policy lifecycle management. Each policy needs its own workflow, covering both first publication and recurring reviews. Setting these up individually in Power Automate is time-consuming and hard to scale.

Lack of integration with other systems

While SharePoint’s integration with Microsoft 365 is a major strength, there may still be a need to integrate with your core GRC software or compliance systems, which is not necessarily straightforward. Recognising this, the Xoralia product includes an API that enables integrations with GRC software and legacy compliance systems.

Templates and reporting

Using SharePoint opens up possibilities for creating policy templates, tailoring targeted views for different personas, and enabling Power BI reporting. But again, none of these come out of the box easily, and customisation may be required.

Potential for technical debt

Some teams try to close SharePoint’s gaps through custom development. Most IT functions resist this for good reason:

incurring additional costs
ongoing technical debt for any upgrades and potential improvements
additional support and maintenance.

Stakeholder reluctance

Some compliance teams want to stick with the policy management capabilities of their GRC system. Often, this is due to SharePoint's shortcomings in policy governance. However, when compliance teams realise there is a viable alternative using a compliance automation platform like Xoralia that transforms SharePoint into a permanent, audit-ready compliance environment, it is usually a genuine lightbulb moment.

Extending SharePoint for policy governance

There are many benefits of using SharePoint for policy management, but there are some significant challenges. Organisations wanting to extend the use of SharePoint for policy management have two main choices:

Use custom development, but swallow the risks around technical debt and ongoing additional maintenance and cost, as well as take on the effort.
Procure a product that builds on SharePoint’s strengths, overcomes the challenges, completes the feature gaps, avoids technical debt and effort, and overall will be more cost-effective.

How does a compliance automation platform like Xoralia overcome the challenges of SharePoint policy management?

Here’s how Xoralia overcomes many of the challenges and closes the gaps.

Challenge	How Xoralia meets the challenge
Feature gaps around SharePoint policy governance	Xoralia automates the complete compliance lifecycle: employee attestation, scheduled policy review, and audit-ready evidence trails, all within your existing Microsoft 365 tenant. Trusted by 200+ regulated organisations, with up to 99% attestation rates and implementation measured in days, not months.
Search and findability	Xoralia makes it easy for employees to find what they need through a single personalised policy library with its own search, custom metadata for browsing, content governance, and version control to reduce search noise. There are even out-of-the-box web parts to present policies in context.
Gaps in review workflow	Xoralia comes with lifecycle management features and configurable workflows for each policy, for both creation and review. Each stakeholder can also check the status of a policy, which covers the end-to-end process, from using a Word template to publishing it to your central policy library.
Lack of integration with other systems	Xoralia has an API to configure integrations with other compliance tools and legacy systems. As Xoralia is built natively for Microsoft 365, all data stays within your own tenant, with no external transfers, no third-party hosting, and SSO via Entra ID as standard.
Templates and reporting	Xoralia lets you use different Word templates for different policy types. There is extensive reporting as well as targeted views to meet multiple use cases and support compliance.
Stakeholder reluctance	Xoralia delivers the compliance automation features compliance teams need, while keeping IT happy, with no new infrastructure, no third-party hosting, and full data sovereignty within your Microsoft tenant. For both audiences, it removes the friction that has held back SharePoint-based compliance.
Potential for technical debt	As a fully supported, Microsoft 365-native compliance automation platform, Xoralia delivers everything required without custom code, custom maintenance, or ongoing technical debt. Updates and new features are managed by Xoralia, not your IT team.

Extending SharePoint policy governance

SharePoint is a strong foundation for compliance management, but without automation for attestation, review cycles, and evidence trails, manual burden persists, and audit-readiness is never guaranteed. Xoralia is the compliance automation platform that closes those gaps, so your organisation moves from chasing policy reviews to having evidence prepared before the auditor asks. Stop managing compliance. Start proving it. Book a free demo to see how it works.

Frequently asked questions

Can SharePoint be used for policy management?

Yes, SharePoint provides strong foundations for compliance management within Microsoft 365, giving employees single sign-on access to policies through familiar tools. However, SharePoint out of the box lacks the compliance automation features that regulated organisations require, including automated employee attestation, scheduled review workflows, and audit-ready evidence trails. A purpose-built compliance automation platform like Xoralia closes those gaps.

How do I extend SharePoint for policy governance?

There are two choices: invest in custom development (with associated technical debt, costs, and maintenance overhead) or deploy a purpose-built compliance automation platform like Xoralia. A platform built natively for Microsoft 365 will automate the complete policy lifecycle, from creation and distribution through to employee attestation and audit-ready reporting, without adding new infrastructure or leaving your Microsoft tenant.

How policy management software can help

We think the best place to store your policies is inside SharePoint. Most companies already have SharePoint as part of their Microsoft 365 subscription. Using SharePoint means you have full control of your policies, and many best practices can be achieved right out of the box. However, there are gaps and certain best practices are hard to achieve.

To fill these gaps, and for best results we recommend using purpose-built policy management software for SharePoint and Microsoft 365.

We’ve developed a dedicated solution called Xoralia (pronounced Zor-ra-lee-a) that will ensure you have the best overall approach to policy management, supporting your users, policy owners and administrators.

We learned all about policy management from many years of building custom solutions for our clients on SharePoint. But we kept coming up against the same challenges, mostly caused by feature gaps in SharePoint. One day, a client asked us to build a policy management tool that filled these gaps. The trouble was, they didn’t have a lot of budget. But we had a good relationship with them and so we decided to collaborate on it provided we got to keep the code. Looking back, it was a pretty simple tool but over the years we have added more features and relaunched it. We’re now on version 3 and our original customer is still using it!

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

AppSource review

A great time saver and tool for document management

We have found Xoralia to be very beneficial to us as it has allowed us to focus on other area’s as Xoralia will take care of who has read the documents and notify them if they have not. A great time saver and tool for document management all together.

Tim Galer

IT Coordinator

Hughes

Ideal partner for our regulated environment

LifeArc operates in a strictly regulated sector where compliance and information security are critical. It is essential that LifeArc’s workforce have easy and effortless access to the latest up-to-date policies and procedures, which is the structure Xoralia gave us.

Adam Lythgoe

IT Manager

LifeArc

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