NAVEX PolicyTech is a popular policy management software solution. However, there are alternatives on the market that not only provide many of the same core features, but also add value through additional capabilities. One alternative solution is Xoralia, a policy and procedure management product based on SharePoint.
In this post we’re going to profile both NAVEX One PolicyTech and Xoralia and then compare the solutions.
What are the advantages of policy and procedure management software?
Every organisation has policies and procedures which employees need to read and follow. At least some of these will be very important or even mission critical, being integral to ensuring compliance, streamlining operations, navigating risk and making sure everyone is on the same page.
Policies don’t look after themselves. Active policy and procedure management is particularly important in organisations within regulated sectors, and also in larger, complex and global business. In these types of organisations, policy management tends to be more complex.
Software is needed to ensure good policy and procedure management. A policy management software solution means that:
- All employees have access to the policies they need at the right time, usually through a central policy repository or library, for example accessible through the intranet.
- Policies can easily be found at the point of need through search or browsing.
- There are measures in place to ensure that employees read certain policies for both compliance and operational reasons, usually through an attestation process where employees acknowledge they have read a policy.
- Policy owners keep their policies up to date and there are no duplicate or outdated policies in place, usually through a range of lifecycle management features and version control.
- There is detailed reporting in place to meet compliance requirements as well as any other related areas of policy management, through automated reports and views.
The good news is that the policy management software market is mature with plenty of options. In this post we’re going to explore a comparison between two leading solutions – NAVEX PolicyTech and Xoralia.
Selecting the policy and procedure management solution that’s right for me
There are many policy management software options on the market with different strengths and varying price points. Some policy management software is offered as part of a suite of wider Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) software. These tend to be more mature solutions that are particularly focused on the needs of the compliance and policy management teams in larger enterprises. The policy management solution is still usually available on a standalone basis, separate from the other GRC tools.
Other solutions integrate with or are even based on SharePoint and sometimes offer a more focused approach that also ensures policies are easy to access for users.
Two leading policy management solutions are NAVEX PolicyTech and Xoralia. Both cover the basics around managing policies across their lifecycle, but also have some differences. NAVEX PolicyTech is a more mature solution that focuses on the wider GRC space, while Xoralia is a “challenger brand” that focuses on both the admin and user experience and leverages complete integration with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
What is NAVEX PolicyTech?
NAVEX One PolicyTech (formerly called PolicyTech Enterprise) is a policy and procedure management solution produced by NAVEX, a US-based provider of GRC software and services. It is available as a standalone product but also slots in with other NAVEX solutions, such as their incident management software.
What features does NAVEX PolicyTech has?
- NAVEX PolicyTech includes some of the core features of policy management software to be found in other solutions, helping to manage polices throughout their lifecycle and providing a central access point for employees to find the policies they need.
- NAVEX PolicyTech supports the creation of policies with custom workflows to ensure the right approvals are in place, with version control and archiving to replace existing policies through the lifecycle.
- The solution includes employee attestation features that can be targeted to different groups so that employees read and acknowledge policies, with reporting to then track and manage progress.
- NAVEX PolicyTech has some multi-language support, coming in 14 different languages as standard, and then some translation workflow to link an original policy with translated versions that can then roll-up into reporting.
- NAVEX PolicyTech says it integrates with SharePoint as well as Microsoft 365, for example with federated search and with Word to aid policy creation; but ultimately NAVEX documents are stored separately rather than within SharePoint itself, unlike a SharePoint-based solution like Xoralia.
- The software can support different policies being placed across multiple or differently branded sites.
- NAVEX PolicyTech supports compliance reporting for policy management, including by mapping different polices to particular compliance standards, which can then be reflected in reporting.
- A weekly back-up is also offered to ensure offline access for your policies if there is an outage.
What is Xoralia?
Xoralia is policy and procedure management software that integrates with SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. It is produced by Content Formula, a UK-based intranet and digital workplace consultancy focused on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
What features does Xoralia include?
- Xoralia ticks the boxes on all of the main features you’d expect from an enterprise policy management solution, many of which are also common to NAVEX PolicyTech and other solutions like ConvergePoint.
- These “classic” policy management including a central policy library for employees to access policies in one place with the ability to add custom metadata to drive search filters and browsable categories, reflecting your structure, locations or brands.
- Like NAVEX PolicyTech, Xoralia also adds employee attestation features that enable “mandatory read” policies to be targeted to different groups or across collections of policy documents; employees must acknowledge the policy.
- There is also an additional ability to add custom quizzes to test and embed learning.
- Like NAVEX PolicyTech, Xoralia also enables policy creation through seamless integration with Word, custom approval workflows and the required audit trails you need for compliance reporting.
- Version control is also a core feature of Xoralia, eliminating issues with multiple versions and outdated policies in circulation.
- Xoralia is a very user-centric product, but it also makes life easy for policy owners with notifications, policy review dates, useful views showing upcoming tasks and more.
- Like NAVEX PolicyTech, Xoralia has reporting but this is also highly granular and flexible to support compliance, the employee attestation process, the policy management process and more. For example, managers are able to track the employee attestation process across their team, while you can also integrate Xoralia’s in-built metrics into a PowerBI dashboard.
5 reasons why Xoralia is an excellent alternative to NAVEX PolicyTech
While Xoralia and NAVEX PolicyTech have some similarities in terms of the features covered, there are some quite distinct differences which are covered below.
1. Xoralia vs NAVEX PolicyTech: ease of use and intuitive interfaces
Feedback from customers and industry contacts strongly suggests that Xoralia is a more user-friendly and intuitive product than NAVEX PolicyTech. The latter can be confusing to navigate for both users and admins, and there is a learning curve associated when starting out with the product.
All in all, NAVEX PolicyTech has an interface you might associate more with a heavy weight document management system or enterprise compliance solution. One particular persistent and frustrating issue is that that the “evergreen” links that always link to the latest version of a document are really hard to find, and instead people click on a URL that is outdated.
Aesthetically NAVEX PolicyTech has more of a cluttered and outdated experience, while Xoralia’s interfaces look more up to date and more user focused. We’ve put a lot of time and effort into the design, and then improving on this, based on real world feedback from customers. We’ve also spent time targeting views to different audiences – users, admins, policy owners, managers and so on, iterating these to improve and enhance our design. Views focus on the essential data that each group needs to know.
For example, our interfaces relating to the employee attestation are very easy to use, leading fo some customers reporting attestation rates of as high as 99%. We believe achieving this is directly related to Xoralia’s ease of use.
2. NAVEX PolicyTech vs Xoralia; SharePoint and Microsoft 365 integration
NAVEX has some limited integration with SharePoint and Microsoft 365. However, compared to Xoralia this is relatively superficial. Xoralia’s integration is much deeper as the solution is based on SharePoint and Microsoft 365 itself.
In practice, this means not only can Xoralia leverage all the strengths of SharePoint like granular access control and version control within document management, but also has a plethora of other advantages:
- All your policy documents stay within your Microsoft 365 tenant, usually meeting existing compliance, data governance and security requirements.
- Lower barriers to usage for everyone – with access via Single Sign-On (no password required) – all within a familiar Microsoft-friendly interface.
- Seamless access through Microsoft Teams where increasingly employees are spending their working day – Xoralia has a dedicated Teams app in contrast to NAVEX PolicyTech.
- Very deep integration with SharePoint so you can integrate Xoralia into existing SharePoint sites or a SharePoint intranet.
- This integration is supported through a unique set of 16 out-of-the-box web parts that are ready to deploy and provide all the views you might need for users, managers and policy owners. These web parts, unique to the Xoralia platform, provide unprecedented levels of SharePoint integration and flexibility to craft the access to policies exactly as you want.
- Uniquely Xoralia also has integration with the Microsoft Viva Connections dashboard, a great option to integrate policy management tasks for frontline staff via the Microsoft Teams app.
- The ability to use the Power Platform to create custom reports and dashboards via Power BI, custom workflows and automation via Power Automate and even policy-related apps via PowerApps.
- Exciting future possibilities to leverage Copilot and generative AI into your policy management processes and experiences, for example to create a policy-related chatbot.
3. Xoralia vs NAVEX PolicyTech: Findability
Xoralia has a strong emphasis on findability, leveraging SharePoint and Microsoft’s powerful search capabilities, as well as the ability to use custom metadata for filtering and browsing options. The web additional web parts in the product also help employees find relevant policies across different parts of the intranet. Strong findability is at the heart of the product.
We’ve heard from customers that search capabilities within NAVEX PolicyTech are less reliable and don’t always return expected or relevant results.
4. Xoralia vs NAVEX PolicyTech: Flexibility
As Xoralia is based on SharePoint, it is highly flexible, scalable and configurable. Features such as Collections allow you to create a library of policies to present to employees, even though these might be scattered across different SharePoint libraries. You can also use the different web parts to create exactly the access you want for employees. Additionally, you can leverage the Microsoft Power Platform to create custom automation, reporting and even apps involving your policies.
NAVEX PolicyTech is a more complex, harder-to-use and less lightweight product compared to Xoralia. We’ve heard feedback from customers that it has some issues with flexibility, for example with the ability to integrate local and global policies. It also requires tedious manual updates for changing permissions. In contrast, Xoralia’s integration with Microsoft 365 means you can use Entra ID roles to update targeting and access to policies which is much quicker.
5. NAVEX PolicyTech vs Xoralia: Roadmap
Xoralia prides itself on being a disrupter in the policy management space. We have a rapidly evolving product with an active roadmap that continues to stay aligned with the Microsoft 365 roadmap, adds new feature and modules, and also continues to improve its user experience. Our roadmap is also heavily influenced by our customers who submit feature requests and ideas.
Our evergreen roadmap is in contrast to more mature solutions like NAVEX PolicyTech which tend to be considerably less active.
Book a free demo
In this article we’ve highlighted some of the similarities and differences between Xoralia and NAVEX PolicyTech. If you want to see for yourself, why not book a free demo?
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.
