User can confirm a document without it opening in the client application.

At the time of confirmation – if “Force View Document” is checked – the user will be required to click on “View Document”. However, it’s still possible to confirm even though the document may have not opened. 

Unfortunately, there is no way we can detect the opening of the document as that’s all purely done outside of the browser (so our code cannot monitor it due to permissions). If it were possible, we would also have to support every type of browser and every type of document that can be placed into a doc library.

Here are a few suggestions :

1. Save the documents to PDF and configure them to “open in a browser”. This also ensures that it is less likely to be edited by someone who was given permissions by mistake. (As you can’t edit a PDF by default). (Lots of customers do this).
2. Move the policy content to a publishing / wiki page, so that it’s then viewable in a browser. Some editors prefer to update the content this way as well. Also gives you opportunity to build a richer policy, from several page assets like images, video, html, flash and audio. (You can also place your own custom code in this page to do anything else you would want to do, like auditing on open).
3. Use DocSurvey to assign a quiz to the document. If they pass the test this will give far more confidence that they understood it.

Some other considerations / approaches :

• If the user doesn’t have permissions to the document, then the “confirm” button will not be enabled. (This was one of the main reasons for adding the force feature in the first place, as an employee could never say “I never read it –  as I couldn’t access it”).
• Finally, having said all that – even if you printed the document out, placed it in front of the employee you still don’t know they actually read it, or understood it. It’s similar to when we all just “accept” the Ts and Cs that appear on many services, such as the IPhone.

If you truly need to prove that a user understood a document then DocSurvey should be used to attach a questionnaire. DocSurvey is an add-on module for DocRead that will allow you to attach a “Quiz” to a document. If attached, the user must pass your required pass mark, before being able to confirm. (A quiz can also contain video, images and rich html). To be extra sure they paged through it, you could embed something like a code in the document (at the end) and then add a question to say “What was the code at the end ?”.. This is also probably the only really true way of ensuring they understood it. You may or may not be interested in this, just thought it was worth a mention.