Firstly, its worth mentioning that only Microsoft Word documents within SharePoint can be printed by the document reader from Xoralia. PDF’s are not printable from the Xoralia interface.

Many might think having policies and such regulated documentation as Microsoft Word documents might not be secure. However, with the right SharePoint document library permissions, word documents are just as secure as PDFs.

By limiting the permissions available to the general user, they will no longer be able to download documents from Xoralia nor download the documents from SharePoint.

It is also worth mentioning that SharePoint’s version control is very powerful. Even after removing access to download or edit documents to the general user, even if a more senior user with the edit access were to amend the document or its metadata, this can always be tracked using SharePoint’s version history feature.

However, if you are not familiar with SharePoint permissions and do not want any risk of editing or downloads from the live library the main advantage of having critical documents as PDFs, are that it provides more control in the no-one, even the M365 administrator will be able to edit the document. Although there are tools online that allow for the conversion of PDF documents to Microsoft Word documents if the user were to download the PDF directly from SharePoint.

For a greater understanding and assistance on SharePoint permissions, Content Formula can provide consultancy during a Xoralia implementation on this topic with our enhanced implementation package.