DocRead for SharePoint is the only policy management software that integrates straight into SharePoint and allows compliance professionals to distribute and track their policies and procedures.

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 may then become overdue and can be tracked on the reports that are accessible from the same SharePoint site as the document originated from. The type of documents that are ‘required’ are usually policies or documents that contain really important information that simply must be read and acknowledged by a deadline. This is analogous to signing a contract. Documents such as these would generally be deemed as ‘required’:

• Sexual Harassment Policy
• Internet Usage Policy
• Health and Safety Policy
• Conduct at Work policy
• and so on.

Recommended Reading

One other great use (and not very well publicised by us), is DocRead’s ability to send out a document as ‘recommended‘. Recommended documents can still be set with a deadline in mind (as they are quite often time dependent), but they never go overdue and email reminders are never sent.

Examples of the types of document you may want to recommend to others is as follows, but realistically the list is limitless:

• Financial results PowerPoint
• Technical Specification
• Business Specification
• Technical Articles
• Marketing materials
• Trade mags
• Christmas Party Video
• Sales forecast spreadsheet
• or, any document that can be placed into a document library.

With the Web Parts that install with DocRead it’s easy to display documents across not only site, and Site Collection but also a Web Application. What does this mean ? Well if you wanted to place the DocRead web part on a MySite then it will automatically show all of the documents sent to that user across a collaboration portal, project portal, Intranet, Extranet etc. In fact any web app with DocRead enabled can be send out documents to groups of users.

As with ‘Required Reading’, ‘Recommended’ documents can also be tracked via DocRead reporting, making it possible to see which users received a recommended reading task and when.