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Why Policy Management Software in SharePoint?

As part of an ongoing series of posts illustrating how SharePoint can help manage the life-cycle of a policy, this post introduces at a high-level the features SharePoint has on offer. To view a list of the required features for a policy management system, please have a look at "The Ultimate Buyers Guide To Policy Management Software".

In this post, I wanted to go over some of the main reasons why organizations need Policy Management Software in SharePoint and why using SharePoint and DocRead to manage your policy compliance is the obvious choice.

Why Policy Management Software?

For as long as companies have existed, they have been regulated by governments, councils, watchdogs, regulatory bodies, shareholders and acts of law to name but a few. For many reasons including the current global economic crisis, increasing global trade and even the introduction of the internet has meant the regulatory burden on organizations is now heavier than ever. Where organizations don't comply, it's common practice for large fines or even prison sentences for owners and/or employees to be received. A recent example of a large fine in the UK was when the FSA fined Willis Limited 7 million pounds for non-compliance of the Bribery Act.

Organizations need to protect themselves, their customers and their shareholders. They always have done and they always will. The daily problem organizations face are:

• How to create, maintain, version and publish policies.
• How do distribute the correct policies to the correct groups of employees.
• How to track who has read the policies and, sometimes more importantly, who has not.
• How to audit and prove who has read what policy and which version.

Why consider using SharePoint for your policy management?

SharePoint is now used in 79% of Fortune 500 companies. It is Microsoft's fastest-selling server product ever. It now generates 2 billion dollars worth of revenue and if it was a company would be in the top 10 of the world's largest. Very impressive stats!

SharePoint is used for document management more than anything else. Organizations are either in the process of moving their documents to SharePoint or have already done so.

If your organizations documents are already in SharePoint, why learn, train on and pay for another external document and content management system? The beauty of using SharePoint for policy management is that you can use all of the tools that you are familiar with and extend it in virtually unlimited ways.

For policy management in particular, SharePoint has many advantages over the traditional file-system, some are listed here:

• Versioning - in the traditional file-system, there is no versioning. Someone saves a file - they overwrite it. The only way around this is to make copies and name them v2, v3 and so on. This leads to thousands of dead documents. SharePoint has version management built in making it really easy to see changes and revert to previous versions if required.
• Collaboration - SharePoint makes collaboration very easy when working on Policies. It's simple to create a new site specifically for authoring a new policy. The new site can contain discussion forums, task boards, meeting minutes and calendars along with a host of other SharePoint features ready to help you get the policy authored and published.
• Approval Workflows - These allow key individuals in your organization to approve the policy. Workflows can be simple, 2 stage or as complex as you require.
• Auditing - Once activated SharePoint auditing can track key events and interactions with your policy, again helping in your compliance efforts.
• Tagging and metadata - It's now common practice to 'tag' documents to give them meaning. This really helps documents to be organised and located. In the old file-system approach documents had to be stored in folders. Once a document was 'pigeon-holed' into a folder it meant that the user looking for the document needed to know the filing system in use. Nearly all documents can be filed into at least 2 folders (e.g. Finance and Policies). Tagging and metadata give this flexibility.
• Search and discovery - Search in SharePoint allows documents to be located very quickly. Search can be refined by your organization to make it fit exactly how you wish it to work.
• Accessibility - SharePoint can be configured to be accessible by third parties or partners via an Extranet, meaning your policies can be assigned to others outside of your organization. It can even be configured to be accessed by internet-based users. These approaches make it possible for the correct people to see the correct documents.
• Security - If you don't want certain people to view, edit or delete a document, then this is a breeze in SharePoint.
• Publishing. SharePoint has some amazing features to allow different types of content to be published and circulated. This can include, video, audio, office docs and even content editable pages within SharePoint. All of this can be indexed and found easily by your staff.

These are just some of the fantastic features that SharePoint gives you and are some of the major reasons why nearly all organizations have moved to SharePoint as a document management system.

However, SharePoint is missing some key features to make it viable as a way to fully manage, track and distribute policies. It has all of the authoring and collaboration features, but falls short of the distribution and tracking side. This is why we built DocRead and why we have many happy customers using it today.

Why DocRead?

Background

One of the major requirements we set ourselves with DocRead was to integrate seamlessly into SharePoint. We wanted to make a product that Microsoft themselves would have made - had they had time. Our customers have told us we have it spot-on. The lines between where SharePoint ends and DocRead starts are very blurred. This is something we are really proud of!

DocRead took many years to build - we never rushed it, we haven't piled it high with features, we concentrated on crafting a product with performance, security and ease of use in mind. We knew as our customers used it they would be instrumental in driving it's direction. A perfect illustration of this is the up and coming quiz module which will be released by the end of the year.

What does DocRead do?

DocRead is a SharePoint add-on that can used to distribute any document in any format (Word, Excel, PDF, web page, etc), to any group of employees and track that they have read it. It just so happens that the majority of our customers use it to distribute policies as they are usually the ones that need tracking and acknowledging.

DocRead works by allowing a policy publisher to specify one or many groups to send a policy to. They must also specify the number of days a user has to read the policy. Once published and approved, DocRead takes care of the rest. Through a series of background jobs we create each person in the group a 'reading task' and set them a deadline to acknowledge and agree to the policy. Emails are sent and web parts can be placed on any web page to ensure that there are no excuses!

Obviously, there are situations where employees don't read documents and these are sometimes the things that are of most interest to organizations. After all non-compliance is the reason for those fines! This is simply solved by using DocRead Reports which are built into SharePoint and allow administrators to concentrate their efforts on those employees whose tasks are overdue.

What's the killer feature in DocRead?

There are many features we are really proud of. Some would say that DocRead's ability to work on documents already managed in SharePoint is the killer. Some would say that the ability to place a reading list web part on any page in any site and see your reading in one place is the killer.

However, during a recent demonstration, it dawned on us that we have been underselling our 'killer feature'. It's something we take for granted, but it's also something that offers such power and a high degree of automation. That feature is 'Smart Move'.

Smart Move means that once you assign a document to group with DocRead, DocRead will then take care of dynamically assigning reading task to the members of the group for as long as it's assigned. This means if you have a 'New Starters' group - once a user gets put into that group, DocRead will intelligently decide that they haven't read key documents and will create reading tasks for them with a deadline. Likewise, if a user leaves the group then DocRead will remove the reading task and issue a negative receipt recording the fact that they never read the document. Read more on Smart Move.

What are the financial benefits?

If you currently use email, paper and phone calls to distribute and track reports DocRead will save you money in days. If your policies are stored in SharePoint then in no time at all you can start distributing them to groups of employees. All our customer feedback leads to the fact that DocRead is also extremely easy for end-users to use and requires minimal training.

If you currently use different policy management software outside of SharePoint and are forced to store documents in two places then we believe that DocRead is so competitively priced that you will still be able to save money by moving to DocRead in SharePoint. This means you can - at last - have one document system not two!

If you are worried about the history - we can also help you migrate documents and history from older systems.

Sound good ?

If DocRead is something you would like to know more about then give us a call or drop us an email at sales@collaboris.com.  We can also put you in contact with some of our customers so you get the real view of what they think!

If you want to find out more about DocRead - why not take the tour ?

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How to Set Up and Refine Templates in DocRead

Version 3.0 of DocRead introduces a new feature which, when combined with DocSurvey allows you to request that groups of users complete a survey / quiz or questionnaire without an associated document. In earlier versions of the software it has been necessary to attach a survey to a document and then assign the document (with the survey attached) to the relevant group of users. Here's how you can simply this process for the end user by creating a Survey Request.

If you already have a licence for and are already using DocSurvey, then please follow the instructions below. If you are going to use DocSurvey for the first time, please follow all of the instructions in the DocSurvey installation guide found in our Documentation Center.

Activate the new Survey Request feature as follows:

1) At the Site Collection level, go to Site Settings and select 'Manage Site Collection Features'.

2) Activate the 'DocSurvey Form Requests Site Collection Feature'.

3) For each site where you are using DocSurvey, go to ‘Site Actions’ then ‘Site Settings’ and under the ‘Site Actions’ menu select ‘Manage site features’ then activate the ‘DocSurvey Form Request Web Features’.

Optional step: Hiding the DocRead task panel for the user

If you wish the user to be able to directly access the survey from the DocRead Web Part then you also need to edit the web part and select 'Enable task panel hiding' from the 'Display' section as shown below.

Using the new Survey Request feature

Once you have activated this feature a new content folder called 'DocSurvey requests' will be created in the Site Contents page.

If you want to assign a DocRead task to users requesting that they simply complete a survey or questionnaire without reading a related document first then instead of linking the survey to a document simply create a survey request as follows:

1. From the Site Settings menu on the site that contains the survey you created with DocSurvey, click on the DocSurvey Requests folder.

2. Click on new item.

3. Give your request a title / name and select the relevant survey from the drop down list.

If you want the users to directly access the survey (as opposed to viewing the DocRead task pane first, also check the ‘hide task info’ box.

4. Add a Survey start message and comment as appropriate.

5. Select the correct group of people who need to complete the survey and set an appropriate response time in the acknowledgement period (days) box.

This uses basic DocRead functionality, for more information, please refer to the DocRead Publishers guide found in our Documentation Centre.

Note: Each person will need to have a DocRead licence, if you experience a licensing error please contact sales@collaboris.com including a copy of any error message received.

6. Save the data. DocRead will process and assign these Survey requests during the next scheduled task processing run.

Why don’t I receive emails?

All emails sent out by DocRead are sent using a separate application called the Collaboris Notification Scheduler. If you aren't receiving emails it's highly likely to be one of the following reasons :

• The Collaboris Notification Service isn't installed and / or configured. Please read this the section on the Scheduler towards the end of the Administrators User Guide found in the Documentation Center.
• The Collaboris Notification Service isn't started. To start load the 'Collaboris Scheduling Configuration Tool' and click 'Start' (see image below).
• The SMTP Server isn't responding or access is denied. (Check connectivity and access). To test connectivity, please refer to this article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153119
• The Email account configured doesn't have permission to send out an e-mail or doesn't have an Exchange mailbox. Please check the user can send mail through Exchange.
• The Collaboris Notification Scheduler cannot connect to the Scheduler or DocRead databases, or access is denied. The scheduler service needs connectivity to both the DocRead database and the Scheduler database, please verify that a connection to the SQL Server can be established. Please also ensure that the account (that the scheduler service runs as), has read and write permissions over the databases. To test connectivity to SQL Server, please refer to this article : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_protocols/archive/2008/04/30/steps-to-troubleshoot-connectivity-issues.aspx
• The user doesn't have a valid email address. DocRead uses the email that is stored against the user's profile in SharePoint. Please ensure the users have email addresses associated with the profile. Please note: for SharePoint server this will more than likely be propagated from Active Directory by the User Profile Sync service. For Foundation, this will be brought in ONCE only when the user logs in. If the email was empty at this time, then you will need to create a script to re-import it, or do it manually.
• The SMTP server requires authentication. Your SMTP server may require a user id and password to send email. Please try adding credentials the Email Settings screen.

Extra Troubleshooting

To help troubleshoot problems with email, a log is also produced in your 'programdata' directory. This will more than likely be here : "%ProgramData%\Collaboris\DocRead Scheduler\Logs".  A log is produced for each day.

How to start the scheduler

Please ensure the Collaboris Notification Service is started :

How to send two different DocRead tasks from the same base document

It is really easy to use DocRead to assign an item that has been stored in a SharePoint document library or list to groups of users who then must acknowledge the completion of the item leaving an audit trail to prove exactly who has completed what task and when. DocRead allows you to select several SharePoint Groups / Active Directory groups and individuals who will all receive the same instructions and will all be asked to complete the same task.

However if you need two groups of employees to read / complete the same information, but with slightly different requirements then this is also easy to arrange without having to duplicate the initial document or save details in multiple locations by using a link to the document.

For example:

1) If you need Group A to read a document and take an associated quiz but also need Group B to read exactly the same document but who do not need to answer the quiz.

2) If Group C are required to read an item, but it only needs to be recommended to Group D and you wish email messages to contain appropriate messages to be sent to both groups.

How to create two DocRead tasks from the same item

1) Save the item in the required SharePoint library or list.

2) Create a link to the document, this is shown in more detail in the post here.

3) Use DocRead message templates to ensure the email notifications and messages the user receives in the DocRead task window are appropriate for the task.

4) Attach surveys created with DocSurvey as necessary.

5) Repeat steps 2, 3 +4 to create as many iterations as you need.

6) Assign each link to the document (with the correct messages) to the correct group(s) of users.

7) Ensure the item is checked in, approved as necessary and a major version has been created, then wait for the DocRead timer job to run (or process reading tasks manually on the site) for the tasks to be created. Remember after the tasks have been created you may need to wait a little while longer for the associated emails to be sent (this will depend on the settings you have used for the email notification schedule timer jobs).

New Publishing Date features released in DocRead version 3

DocRead Version 3.0 introduces more control over publishing dates for a document or item that will be assigned via DocRead in the DocRead Settings section.

TO ACCESS THE NEW DOCREAD SETTINGS MENU:

1. Click on the ellipsis against the specific document you with to amend.

2. Then click the ellipsis again

3. Then select the DocRead Settings Option