DocRead Blog

This post explains how to amend the DocRead reading list web part to maximise it's impact for the end user. It specifically shows how to exclude completed tasks and select columns to be displayed.

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.

This post describes the two different ways you can easily manage documents that require regular employee acceptance with DocRead. For example, lets assume you want to issue a "Safe Winter Driving" document to your company car drivers every autumn and ensure that they all read and acknowledge the item.

A list of all the things that you need to consider when deciding whether to maintain 1 SharePoint document library or to use many ? As you would imagine there is no correct answer, but hopefully this list allows you to make an informed decision.

From time to time you may need to give the effect of storing documents in SharePoint, without them actually being stored in SharePoint document libraries. Maybe you have a raft of documents in external systems that you want to make available by SharePoint. This post shows how to make documents available in SharePoint using the “Link To a Document” content type.

This post provides an overview of what a DocRead Reading Task is and how they get created and managed by DocRead Timer jobs.

DocRead for SharePoint is very powerful because it’s very easy to configure an important document to be sent and tracked to all employees in an organization in just a few clicks. Once a document has been distributed, an employee will be notified by email (on creation, completion and overdue) and will also be able to view their reading tasks via DocRead web parts placed in prominent such as the Intranet home page or a user’s MySite. Doing this means that if they are required (or recommended) to read a document there’s simply no escape.

Over the last 2 years - whilst helping customers benefit from DocRead for SharePoint - we have discussed the management of policies and procedures (within SharePoint) on several occasions. We have found that some organizations are really struggling to understand how SharePoint can help them manage the entire life-cycle, (not just the distribution and tracking side that DocRead helps with).

Managing the full life-cycle of a policy or procedure in SharePoint requires you to use many of it's features and can be quite a daunting task if SharePoint isn't your day job. To help share best practice and encourage sharing of ideas we have created a closed LinkedIn Group.

We are now well under way with the development of our new add-on module for DocRead called DocSurvey. DocSurvey's main purpose is to allow DocRead administrators to configure a quiz or survey at the time that the user wants to confirm a policy. If they pass the quiz they can confirm the document. DocSurvey will also be able to operate as a stand-alone component from DocRead. This means if you want to simply create a quiz or course and e-mail it to users, you will be able to do so.

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.

If you are an organization that needs to distribute and track policies, documents, procedures, manuals to your employees, then you will know that this can be an onerous and time consuming task.

We've already been asked by a couple of customers whether DocRead will run (and be supported) on SharePoint 2013. Obviously, our answer is a resounding yes! However, until now we haven't sized up how much effort it was going to be.

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is not the creation and maintenance of the employee handbook, but how to ensure employees read and acknowledge / agree to it. Traditionally this has been achieved by creating a glossy brochure and requesting employees return a separate advice slip confirming they have read the document which is then stored for future reference. However more and more organizations are turning to electronic solutions to provide a more efficient and cost effective approach.

For those considering SharePoint as a platform to manage their organization's policies and procedures a well configured Search service is probably the most important thing that can be done.

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).

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.

Once your policy has been created, reviewed and approved. It should then be moved to a policies and procedures site within your main SharePoint Intranet. To move the policy you can use something called the Content Organizer, but it can also just as easily be manually copied. (For information, the Content Organizer allows your policy to be automatically routed to the correct library based on rules you specify).

Over the last few weeks I have been working on a white paper called 'Life-cycle of a policy or procedure in SharePoint'. One of the main staples of this whitepaper is going to be diagram depicting what the life-cycle looks like.

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.

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.

As requested by the majority of our customers, we are proud to announce that DocRead 1.2 now has the ability to force users to "download" a document before they can confirm and agree to the terms.

If you are expecting emails to be sent out to individuals who have been assigned Reading Tasks and they aren't - then use this post to troubleshoot the most common causes.

DocRead for SharePoint is now being used to send out compliance policies by organizations all over the world to help ensure that staff and third parties are compliant with corporate policy. Here's a list of some of the documents that customers have agreed to share with us.

Some of you may have noticed that last week we released a new DocRead site. Many of the old pages have been re-designed to help customers get the information they need much quicker.

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.

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!):

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.

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

DocRead is a fantastic tool which can be used throughout an organization to electronically distribute important documents to specific groups of users and then monitor via a reporting suite who has and has not read them. To ensure that your organization does not go DocRead 'trigger happy' and issue less important documents to your users, there are several ways you can restrict and control the use of DocRead.

This post gives a brief introduction into what a SharePoint audience and a SharePoint group is and then ends with a summary of the main differences.

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

Over the last 2 weeks we have been helped by Max Slade, aged 15, who has worked with us as part of a student placement scheme.

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).

SharePoint Information Management Policies are very useful for automatically performing actions on a document at some point in the future. For example, your organization may conform to ISO 9001 standards which require that documentation should be regularly reviewed and refreshed. It's also extremely good practice to clean, prune, and removed documents that are no longer needed. This makes an end-users life easier (better search results) and also lowers the storage costs.

This post explains some of the challenges that organizations face today when trying to get the content into the hands of those individuals that need to see it and acknowledge it.

OK, so here's the thing - you've created a fabulous training video informing staff how to avoid injuring themselves when lifting heavy objects and you now need to ensure that all relevant staff watch it and follow your guidance. DocRead for SharePoint can ensure that all relevant employees are made aware of the required training and provides management reports allowing you to find out who has (and has not) completed the training.

As part of an on-going series of posts illustrating how SharePoint can help manage the life-cycle of a policy, this post explains how SharePoint's document management features can be used to help manage the creation and revision of a policy or procedure.

To keep up with the latest expert information around the area of policies and procedures I tend to do a lot of reading and research. As a result of this I wanted to share and recommend some fantastic 'policies and procedure' books written by Stephen Page.

I am big fan of List.ly now and getting a bit addicted! Anyway, I have added a new list which lists some of the big advantages that using SharePoint to manage policies and procedures has over using a non-SharePoint 3rd party solution. Feel free to add more and vote!

SharePoint has all of the features necessary to manage the life-cycle of a policy or procedure. This post forms part of a larger series that is intended to cover all of those features in detail.

As you may know I am setting about on a campaign to try illustrate how Microsoft SharePoint can be an ideal choice for managing the life-cycle of your policies and procedures.

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. If you want to see a particular feature added please get in touch at support@collaboris.com.

For Helen, Jamie and myself, much of last week was about preparing for the two webinars we ran via GotoWebinar. To view a "near to live" recording please go http://www.collaboris.com/products/docread/screencasts/how-to-distribute-policies-in-sharepoint-with-docread.

As part of one of our recent webinars, we decided to put together a fictional SharePoint 2010 Intranet called "United Exports". If you weren't able to attend then this post gives a quick look at some of the screens we showed off.

If you are wondering why you have no 'Reading Tasks' when you have assigned a 'Required' or 'Recommended' document to a group or audience of users this post will help you resolve and troubleshoot the most common reasons.

If you raise a Purchase Order for DocRead Professional Edition by June 30th 2012 - we will double the user licenses giving you an amazing 1500! The license fee is one-off and includes the first year Premium Support, meaning there are no yearly costs to worry about. Please note, if you decide to purchase technical support after the first year, then this is roughly 20% of the licensing cost.

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.

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.