How Xoralia’s intranet widgets open up policy & SOP access
- Amber Oakes
- 30 December 2024
One of the most challenging aspects of compliance is being able to make sure that employees can find and engage with controlled documents such as policies, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and guidelines at the time of need.
Being able to access these documents is critical to guide decision-making, support operational processes and drive compliance, especially in regulated industries.
Why accessing policies, SOPs and guidelines can be hard
Despite their importance, accessing polices, SOPs and other controlled documents in not always straightforward:
- In global or complex organisations there are multiple polices and SOPs pertaining to different jurisdictions and divisions.
- Different roles have different needs and people can find it difficult to find the documents that are relevant to them, especially if they are on the frontline.
- In digital workplaces where documents tend to be hard to find, there may be multiple versions of a policy in circulation.
- Policies and controlled documents aren’t easily available in the flow of work and employees don’t know where to find them or aren’t confident they will and just ask a colleague.
- Policies, SOPs and guidelines are often tightly controlled to ensure they are authored, updated and approved to auditable protocols; this means they are often held in document management systems that are complex and have a poor user experience, again away from the flow of work.
Transforming the way controlled documents are accessed
At Xoralia we’re on a mission to transform the way that controlled documents are accessed by employees as well as how document owners manage them. Businesses can’t compromise on the controls they need to drive compliance and establish document version and integrity. At the same time, employees must not experience poor findability or an inferior user experience; this is essentially a compliance risk, as your people will simply not find or ignore your controlled documents.
With many other solutions – including overcomplicated document management systems and compliance suites – tend to sacrifice user experience for better control, we avoid any such trade-offs.
One of the ways we achieve this is through a series of highly innovative intranet widgets (or web parts) that seamlessly integrate Xoralia into your SharePoint intranet.
These go way beyond your normal SharePoint document library web part, Instead, they can act effectively as a set of SOP web parts or policy library web parts that mean:
- Policies, guidelines and SOPs are more easily accessed, both through the intranet and also within Microsoft Teams.
- Ensures that controlled documents presented are both personalised and audience-specific so employees can see exactly what they need for specific roles and scenarios.
- Eliminates many of the problems with findability, versioning and poor user experience many employees face with large repositories or overly complex GRC systems.
- Allow teams to configure and optimise the appearance of their widgets to ensure they are more user-friendly, accessible and on-brand.
How a Xoralia policy management web part and SOP web part makes a difference: four industry examples
Xoralia’s SharePoint intranet widgets (also known as web parts) are extremely flexible and versatile and can be configured and deployed for a wide variety of different scenarios and use cases across different sectors, functions, and roles.- Example #1 Manufacturing
- Heavy manufacturing like a steel plant will have a lot of machinery which will have documentation relating to operating guidelines, maintenance procedures and health & safety guidelines which teams need access to.
- Using an Xoralia intranet widget, crane operators would be able to access these essential documents on their standard team intranet page without the need for a search, knowing that the documents are up to date. Having easy access to these documents not only supports consistent operations, but also compliance and safety.
- Example #2 Financial Services
- Financial Services is a heavily regulated sector where there are a very high number of regulations to consider including MiFID II regulations, the latest anti-money laundering measures, and increasingly cybersecurity considerations. For example, a customer-facing employee in a bank might need to quickly access one of hundreds or even thousands of controlled documents to check a detail as a customer waits.
- The employee cannot afford to spend time searching for a needle on a haystack, especially with a customer waiting. But with Xoralia’s highly targeted intranet widgets, that employee can simply to go to the relevant intranet page suited to her role where documents that are commonly required by customer-facing staff can be easily found.
- Example #3 Healthcare
- Healthcare is a sector where following the right process is essential across multiple areas including clinical operations, cleaning procedures, handling personal data and more. Full compliance is an ongoing challenge.
- Imagine in a hospital, clinical staff at the nursing station needing to quickly view some essential protocol and procedural documents. A nurse simply does not have any time to wade through a library of thousands of documents in a DMS. Using Xoralia, a nurse can quickly view the documents that are targeted to their audience via the intranet where they are already logged into, and avoid wasting precious time on fruitless searching.
- Example #4 The frontline and mobile workforce
- Many sectors have a large proportion of frontline workers including field technicians, site engineers, factory workers, drivers and so on. They usually do not have access a terminal during the day but may rely on a mobile device to access information. When essential safety guidelines or operational documentation are locked in a document management system, it often means that frontline workers cannot easily access a mobile-friendly version of the critical content they need. However, Xoralia intranet widgets ensure that frontline staff can access intranet pages that contain the right information in an experience fully optimised for mobile devices.
What are some of the Xoralia web parts available?
There are a wide range of Xoralia widgets (web parts) available that can be easily deployed on to your SharePoint intranet. Each of these is flexible, can be configured to both in terms of what is displayed and how it appears, and more!
The growing library of Xoralia intranet widgets includes:
- All documents library web part: allows the user to browse through a set of controlled documents.
- Must read documents web part: shows the mandatory documents that must be read, targeted to the individual.
- Documents due for review web part: shows any controlled documents assigned to a policy or document holder that is due for review.
- Org-wide documents review for web part: shows the compliance team or managers all the policies and other controlled documents that are due for review.
- My favourites: displays any controlled documents or collections of documents within Xoralia favourited by a user.
- Collections: Allows administrators to display a particular set of controlled documents as a group on a particular theme such as ISO27001, even if they are stored in different libraries.
- My Collections: Allows administrators to review the collections they are responsible for so they can make updates, for example.
- My recently viewed documents: allows a user to view Xoralia documents they recently accessed.
- Recently viewed Collections: allows a user to view Collections of Xoralia documents they recently accessed.
- Drafts for my review and approval: allows document and policy owners to view and approve any documents with approval workflow they are responsible for.
- Document search: a flexible and powerful web part that allows users to search for Xoralia documents.
A policy and procedures module integrated into your SharePoint intranet
Finding controlled documents within a document management solution or Governance, Risk and Compliance suite of tools is often complicated and has a poor user experience.
Xoralia intranet widgets provides a much-improved user experience that can be more easily accessed in the flow of work; your controlled documents are more findable and accessible. This means better compliance, reduced risk and increased operational efficiency. At the same time, you keep full control of your policies, SOPs and guidelines with a range of extended lifecycle features that your document owners can also access via the intranet.
By balancing document control with usability, accessibility and findability you’re effectively create a successful policy and procedures module that is fully integrated into your SharePoint intranet.
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
-
Central policy library
-
Search and filter tools
-
Mandatory read policies with attestations
-
Quizzes
-
Notifications and alerts
-
Employee dashboard
-
Line manager dashboard
-
Works on mobile, in Teams and SharePoint
-
New policy creation workflows
-
Policy update workflows
-
Review and approval gates
-
Policy version history
-
Compliance dashboard
-
Audit trail
-
Full reporting
And last but not least:
-
Professional implementation service and support
-
Evergreen software – frequent updates and improvements
-
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
