Using SharePoint for policy and procedure management
- 19 June 2024
- By Dan Hawtrey
A robust and comprehensive set of policies and procedures play an important role in meeting organisational compliance and minimising risk. However, with continuously evolving laws and regulations, it can often be difficult for policy managers to keep track of multiple document lifecycles and ensure that all employees have been provided with the correct and most up-to-date information in order to do their job and to ensure organisational compliance
Organisations often require an effective policy and procedure management solution that will enable policy managers and administrators to quickly distribute policies to employees, easily obtain attestation and collaborate on policy updates.
Most companies already use Microsoft 365 or certain components of it to fulfill their business processes, but a product that is commonly utilised by organisations for policy document management is Microsoft SharePoint.
Leveraging SharePoint for policy and procedure management offers a robust solution for organizations looking to streamline their document management processes. SharePoint provides a centralized platform for creating, storing, and sharing policies and procedures, ensuring that employees have easy access to the most current documents. With features like version control, workflows, and permissions management, SharePoint helps maintain compliance, enhance collaboration, and improve operational efficiency.
What is Microsoft SharePoint?
Microsoft SharePoint is a website-based collaboration platform that provides an environment for people inside and outside of an organisation to work together. At it’s core, SharePoint can be described as a document management and storage system, that allows the accessing and sharing of information within one centralised location. It also enables organisations to automate their key workflow processes across multiple business areas.
Why SharePoint is ideal for policy and procedure management?
Many organisations now have a digital workplace based on Microsoft 365, using SharePoint Online as the basis for their intranet and document collaboration. This is great news for effective policy management because SharePoint is an ideal base technology for successful policy management.
The key component of SharePoint is it’s document management capabilities. It encompasses a wide variety of functionalities and features that are ideal for managing the lifecycle of controlled documents in an robust and process-driven way, from the creation and dissemination of new policies, through to policy review.
Combined with the other tools available in Microsoft 365, SharePoint offers an advanced and comprehensive policy management solution that will suit organisations of all sizes.
Key reasons to use SharePoint for policy and procedure management
You probably already have SharePoint
Many organisations already have SharePoint bundled with their Office 365 or Microsoft 365 licensing, making it a readily available platform for policy management. Microsoft’s continuous improvements have enhanced SharePoint’s ease of use and speed, making it a familiar tool for document management. Documents can be easily shared, collaborated on, and version control is effective, ensuring a single source of truth—critical for managing policies. Leveraging SharePoint for policy management means your users are already familiar with the system, and it is fully secured and backed up by Microsoft, providing peace of mind.
You can introduce automation and track the policy lifecycle
Lifecycle management is key to successful policy management. SharePoint integrates seamlessly with Power Automate, allowing you to automate workflows and processes around the policy content lifecycle. Create clear ownership, notifications, and workflows to ensure policies are kept up to date and provide views that show admins the status of policies.
Audit trails and version control ensure compliance
SharePoint provides a complete audit trail of changes made to policies and procedures, offering transparency and accountability. You can track updates across versions, showing when and who made changes, which is crucial for compliance and external auditing purposes.
It provides easy access for all employees
Centralised access to policies is crucial. With most organisations using SharePoint for their intranet, project sites, or communication sites, integrating a policy document library into existing channels is quick and easy. This ensures employees can easily access necessary documents, whether through the intranet or Microsoft Teams, which is increasingly central to workplace communication.
You can leverage Microsoft search
Using Microsoft search ensures policies are easily discoverable, helping employees find necessary documents through intranet search functionality. With CoPilot, Microsoft’s AI offering, it’s possible to include policy knowledge and content in AI outputs, further enhancing findability.
You can track usage
SharePoint allows tracking of policy usage, including views and updates. Integration with Active Directory and Power BI enables real-time reporting, supporting effective policy management. Critical data such as mandatory document reads can be tracked, ensuring compliance.
You can target policies
You can integrate with Azure Active Directory and the 365 groups that have been set up to help target policies to the right groups, such as new hires or a function like engineering or sales staff. You can also ensure people access the right policy based on their profile so people in Brazil see a different HR policy to those in France, for example.
What is SharePoint missing?
Although SharePoint is a highly flexible platform that offers many great features for document management, there are some important areas that it doesn’t cover. This means you’ll likely need either some custom development or advanced configuration to make SharePoint into a full policy and procedure management solution.
There are two options you could use to achieve this.
- Build functionality using Microsoft’s rich toolset, using tools like Power Automate, Power BI and some clever code. This is not an easy task by an stretch of the imagination, but you’ll have fun along the way and learn a whole lot!
- Another way is use to Xoralia policy management software. Xoralia has been built for sharePoint and enables you keep all your policies inside SharePoint and leverage the good stuff like version control, workflows etc, whilst filling the gaps in functionality that SharePoint doesn’t provide.
What gaps does Xoralia policy and procedure management software fill?
Xoralia software is a full policy management solution that provides a comprehensive set of features and functionalities designed to fill the gaps in SharePoint and to provide the sophistication that a robust policy management regime demands. Xoralia policy management software includes:
A central policy library
Xoralia acts as a central policy and procedure library that can be reached via a SharePoint-based intranet or via a SharePoint site. When accessing Xoralia, users are presented with an attractive and intuitive interface that has been designed to help employees find the policy documents they are looking for.
Each policy is listed with details including the title, the owner, the document format, the date it was last updated and any related instructions, such as whether it must be read. These instructions are personalised to the user. A handy summary at the top of the page also lets a user see the number of policies that they have to read.
Auditability
Organisations may need to demonstrate to regulators or other external bodies that they have robust processes in place to manage their policies and that all employees have read policies that are considered to be mandatory. Xoralia leverages the power of SharePoint to provide a complete audit trail of document changes, and also shows clear review policies in place with the ability to track these.
Xoralia can help ensure employees are carrying out mandatory reads. If a policy is mandatory to read, an employee can access the document within the app and confirm attestation once it has been read. It’s built-in report then shows policy owners and admins the percentage of those who have read the policy.
Automated notifications
Notifications ensure that policy owners are reminded to review the policies they own. Xoralia also has a simple dashboard that displays when a policy is due for review or has expired.
Reports for mandatory reads and more
Xoralia comes with powerful tracking and reporting tools. It shows policy owners the percentage of users that have read a policy, whilst administrators can access a more detailed report showing the status of all mandatory reads as well as other information relating to document status.
These reports can help teams to prepare for audits, and help policy managers see when interventions may be necessary.
Strong search facility
It is important for employees to be able to find the right policy quickly and effortlessly. Xoralia includes a strong search facility whereby an employee can enter keywords to find the policy they are looking for. Additionally, employees can filter by different categories including mandatory and non-mandatory reads, the department that owns the policy (IT, HR, Legal etc.) as well as custom tags .
Easy installation and deployment
Xoralia is quick and easy to implement. Because Xoralia can be applied to an existing SharePoint library it means you can easily convert an existing policy library to Xoralia. It can also be deployed from within any SharePoint intranet or other SharePoint site.
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!
Testimonials
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
