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One of the major uses for DocRead is it's ability to help in compliance efforts by sending out 'Required' reading to a group of users. Once it's been distributed a deadline is set and reminders will be sent to those users. The document will then may become overdue and can be tracked on the reports that are accessible from the Sharepoint site.

A good friend of ours (Ian McNeice from Salem) had a bit of fun recently and produced a video of a couple of well known favourites discussing DocRead on board the Enterprise. It's very funny and worth a watch.

As part of an on-going series of 'Testing SharePoint with Selenium' we intend to share some of what we have learnt when trying to automate the testing of a SharePoint add-on called DocRead. These posts will specifically cover functional and integration testing - not unit testing (which is worth a whole conversation on it's own).

A question recently came up asking us to explain how DocRead was different from what you can achieve with standard 'Information Management Policies' in SharePoint.

We recently received query for DocRead to see if it was possible to set the 'Required Audience' and 'Acknowledgement Days' to about 100 policies on mass (via a script). Hence, being one who is always up for a challenge, I cranked open PowerGUI and set to work.

This post explains how to create a new Document Library in SharePoint 2010. It also explains the creation of 2 columns that can (optionally) be configured for use with DocRead.

We are proud to announce the next set of features that have been agreed for our Roadmap. We are working closely with our clients to release features important to them first but everything below will be included in DocRead v2 (due for release in Summer 2012).

This blog post outlines how to distribute a document contained in a DocRead enabled Document Library. Documents can either be distributed to SharePoint Groups or Audiences.

SharePoint 2010 Top Tips : How to add documents to a SharePoint document library. This user friendly step-by-step guide shows you how to add a document to a SharePoint 2010 document library.

This blog post explains in very simple terms how to add users to a SharePoint group! Treat it as a quick-reference guide.

This post will discuss how to create a Survey in SharePoint using out of the box functionality and nothing else! The example we will use is to create a survey that asks employees to answer questions about their previous training in the organisation.

DocRead can distribute, process, track and reporting on reading tasks for 1000’s of end users. To achieve this, an enterprise architecture had to be designed and implemented. This article gives a quick overview of the main components in the architecture.

SharePoint Workflow allows a set of activities to process in either sequential or parallel, more often than not one or more of those activities involves a human activity such as 'approve a document', or 'complete a task' and so on.

Information Management Policies in SharePoint in my experience, are not used that heavily, but are an extremely easy way to apply policies to your documents. They are accessible from 'Library Settings' and are configurable per content type. For example, this means that all 'documents' in the library will have the policy applied.

This series of blog post will highlight 10 features that SharePoint has in order to allow regulatory compliance. There are in fact, many regulations that require compliance for an organisation, these will depend on the type of industry, the country and/or type of business that the organisation is involved with.

We often get asked - why do we need DocRead when we can do it in workflow? Here's how DocRead differs from a custom-designed or the collect-signatures workflow. Workflow is triggered once when the document is checked in and published. DocRead is also triggered when the Document is published, but it also "listens" for membership changes in your groups and audiences. For example, if you required that a "Health and Safety Policy" is read and acknowledged by all new starters, DocRead will automatically send out a required reading task as soon as new starters are put into your groups and / or audiences. This works equally as well for users moving between departments and joining projects or teams (we call this Smart Move).

We are very often asked how DocRead differs from its competitors. Here's a recent response we gave (slightly tweaked to protect the identity of the requestor!):