How Xoralia simplifies creating policies and controlled documents
- Amber Oakes
- 18 February 2025
Managing policies and other controlled documents is a critical activity for every organisation, supporting compliance, minimising risk and establishing governance. It’s even more important in regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.
Policy management and governance solutions such as Xoralia do much of the heavy lifting on policy management to:
- Deliver a central library of policies that are easily accessible and findable at the point of need
- Ensures only the latest versions of documents can be found
- Use automation to dramatically reduce the manual effort usually associated with effective policy management
- Support mandatory reads and employee attestation features to drive compliance and support associated reporting
- Help policy and documents owners keep everything up to date via smart notifications and targeted views that give them an overview of any upcoming tasks.
Helping policy owners create controlled documents
Another key area where Xoralia supports policy owners is supporting the actual creation of policies, SOPs, guidelines and other controlled documents. This is an area where it is not always easy to get controlled documents owners to create policies or SOPs that:
- Are created at the right time.
- Use the right or standard format.
- Have been reviewed and approved by the right people.
- Have been shared in the right way to make them accessible and findable.
When the above doesn’t happen, it means policies aren’t kept up to date, can’t be found by employees and may even be missing some important details. This undermines compliance and ultimately means documents get ignored.
However, document creation features within Xoralia have been set up to:
- Save times and cost for admins and policy owners.
- Support standard and optimised policy formats which can be mandatory.
- Lead to a better employee experience.
- Eliminate frustration.
- Minimise risks and mistakes.
- Increases buy-in and accountability of policy and document owners by making things easier for them.
- Integrate with SharePoint and Microsoft 365 for easy access and use of Microsoft Office applications as a seamless part of the process.
- Accentuate Xoralia as an all-in-one policy management solution helping to benefit adoption and compliance.
Let’s explore five ways Xoralia supports the creation of policies and controlled documents, and the benefits this brings.
1. Saves users from having to use SharePoint
Xoralia leverages the power of SharePoint libraries in order to store policies and controlled documents; however, policy owners don’t need to go into SharePoint to upload or create documents. They can use Xoralia’s intuitive and user-friendly interface, which is much easier, saves time, eliminates mistakes and reduces frustration. Asking your policy holders to add or even create documents directly within the SharePoint back-end interface is often less than ideal for a number of reasons:- It can feel like a big ask for policy users to go into what they will perceive as two different systems – Xoralia and SharePoint.
- It’s not always clear how to add the document and they will need to venture into settings and site content; realistically some will need handholding or may give up.
- There’s an increased chance of them adding a document in the wrong place, such as a different document library.
- It may take longer; SharePoint’s interfaces can be a little more than a confusing and clunky in places, especially for less confident and infrequent SharePoint users.
2. Brings policy creation into the flow of work
One of the most beneficial consequences of Xoralia’s seamless integration with Microsoft 365 is that it can be embedded directly in the Microsoft Teams desktop app, as well as reached via the browser. With so many employees spending their working day within Microsoft Teams, this means it’s easier for them to access the policies they need more directly in the flow of work.
However, this also applies to policy owners who can also create and add documents within Xoralia directly from Teams; this is not only convenient but removes one more barrier to successfully uploading and creating policies. Most people are very familiar with Teams, are comfortable using it and will always have it open.
3. Establishes clarity and governance about who can create policies
A common problem with policy management is when there isn’t absolute clarity over who is responsible for creating a particular policy, or it is left as the responsibility of an entire team rather than named individuals. This can mean policy management becomes a free-for-all. People forget to update documents, the wrong people update policies, or people without the authority post duplicate policies on local sites.
Xoralia establishes absolute clarity about who is responsible for creating and updating a policy and then reinforces this with permissions to ensure only the named people can create particular policies. Other roles such as people reviewing and approving a new policy are also established – this is covered in more detail below. This supports the overall governance of policy management.
4. Ensures documents are uploaded to the right place
One of the challenges of ensuring policies and other controlled documents are truly findable and accessible is making sure they are uploaded to the right place. When there isn’t a policy management solution like Xoralia and people are left to their own devices to upload a document to the right SharePoint site or document library, then its inevitable mistakes are going to be
made. And if a policy is added to the wrong place, it may mean nobody can actually find it, or even has the right permissions to view it.
By creating policies within Xoralia you can control the list of document libraries (through permissions) that a particular policy owner can add a document to. These are presented in a convenient list and only the libraries that a person has the rights to upload into are displayed, so it’s much less likely that a document will be added to the wrong SharePoint library, it is also possible to just have one document library for some policy owners, effectively making the system fool-proof.
Overall, this not only saves time by eliminating the need to correct mistakes but supports a more efficient system while also maintaining governance, ensuring important documents don’t go astray.
5. Forces the use of documents templates to standardise policies
One of the strongest features of Xoralia is the ability to make the use of a particular Word or PowerPoint template mandatory as part of the policy creation process. This not only again saves huge amounts of time for the policy owner and for anyone reviewing and approving the policy, but also ensures:
- All the required sections of a policy or SoP are included.
- Is branded in the right way so employees recognise it is official and up to date.
- Helps support the right metadata and information is included, supporting governance and findability.
- Helps enforce document naming conventions.
Is in a familiar format that also make its more useful and scannable for employees, for example including FAQs, summaries and headings.
The beauty of Xoralia is you can also apply different templates for different document libraries which in turn are allocated to different roles. So, for example, you might have different policy templates, one set for HR professionals and for the Health & Safety team, for example. These can be made mandatory to use or optional, depending on the configuration within Xoralia. You can also make a choice of templates available for different people, so Xoralia is fully flexible around your policy management processes.
6. Uses approval workflow
Finally, Xoralia has in-built approval workflow which means once your policy is created, it can then be submitted for review and approval by the right people, involving more than one stakeholder if necessary. The document can be directly edited by a reviewer and approver, and you can also track the approval process within Xoralia.
The approval workflow helps minimise risk, so every policy goes through the right review and approval process. It also streamlines the publishing workflow, avoiding the bottlenecks and delays that come when you’re doing everything on email.
Creating policies using Xoralia
So far, we’ve had great feedback about Xoralia’s features which support the creation of policies; they save time, put the necessary approval process, reduce mistakes and overall streamlines policy creation. If you’d like to experience Xoralia first hand, then 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.
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
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
