We are undergoing a re-write of many of our corporate policies and I would like to propose a system for managing these. To date, they are strewn about many different emails, SharePoint sites and Teams. Obviously this isn't sustainable.
I'm not adverse to buying new software for this, however I generally am not a fan of niche software that isn't integrated with the rest of our systems.
An ideal system would allow for certain people to update policies, but most (or all) employees being able to see the policies. It must either integrate with M365 or just be a solution native to the platform. Ideally folks would be able to track changes to the policy with different versions to see what's changed, and maybe get an alert when there is a new or updated policy.
I figure I could do most of this with SharePoint but feels like I'd be building a lot of it from scratch. Any thoughts on what works well for you? I assume there are a lot of people frustrated by this and a lot of people thinking to themselves, "If I could build this all over again I'd do it this way…." so come at me!
You are way over thinking this. Share via M365 with comments on. Done
HR / Legal needs to own the document. Departments change the content they own and submit to HR to update the master doc.
What you’re looking for is likely either called a “Document management system” or a “content management system”.
Ours is all built in-house, so I don’t have a recommendation, but those terms for search should get you on the right path.
You need a “Document Manager”.
I have used Alfresco as a Document Manager, maybe there are other options, I know SharePoint has a history version and maybe it can be used as Document Manager
If you don’t need the documents to be in word/excel formats specifically, then I highly recommend bookstackapp. We’ve recently deployed this, and it is a breath of fresh air.
Initially I had written it off because of the shelf/book/chapter/page analogy it uses for organisation, but when you break it down for company policies and knowledge sharing, it actually works really well.
You can do really cool things like embed videos in pages, revision control is awesome, it has webhooks for your notifications, the search is super powerful, tagging works well, you can have comments turned on or off, integrates with draw.io for easy flowcharts, permissions are flexible and you can even base the user roles on their AD groups if you enable LDAP.
Best of all, it’s open source and free and works really fast.
Just so you understand a bit. HR defines policy, hopefully consulting with lawyers and what not. NO person outside of HR should be allowed to change or update policies. Period.
Please eliminate that from your document management process.
There are 3rd parties that have pre-build solutions they can slide into your SharePoint. That’s probably going to be you best option so it’s still integrated with all the O365 stuff but you don’t have to build it your self.
If you are already in the M365 space, could you not just look at creating a sharepoint site called Policies or Quality or whatever corporate want.
You can then have different libraries for different departments. set reviews and approvals, (meaning only select people can edit and publish documents) you could even look at having lists that link to the polices with review dates and reminders.
the big question I would guess would be if you are at the size where this is doable or if you need/want something specific.
Thanks for sharing this!