SharePoint helps organizations to create a collaborative work environment with an efficient and secured data storage, analyzing, and distributing platform for businesses. One of the major functions SharePoint helps policymakers perform is streamlining and organizing the complex and vast data that goes into creating and updating policies.

From an enterprise policy management perspective, SharePoint works perfectly as a collaborative work system where the leadership can work together with key departments such as HR and IT to update company policy and communicate changes with their employees quickly and securely.

The sheer versatility of SharePoint with its plethora of features can be customized to match individual business needs. It also applies to designing the most comprehensive policy management ecosystem to handle the dynamic external compliance burden. Being the central hub of information, SharePoint also helps in upgrading policies to match scalability and digital integration needs.

Now, let’s take a look at SharePoint’s key features that can help organizations streamline and modernize enterprise policy management:

1. Secure data storage
   

The biggest strength of SharePoint is its secure architecture and data storage. The platform provides centralized storage for the company’s sensitive data, which also includes the company policies and market insights. SharePoint provides end-to-end storage security with the following features:

• Permission-based access: SharePoint enables policy and decision-makers to assign various permission levels to users depending on the company hierarchy, which means only the top-level management or specific designated users can create, view, or modify policies.
  
  
• Version control: SharePoint’s version tracking allows users to prevent accidental deletion and overwriting by restoring the last relevant version easily.
  
  
• Audit trail: SharePoint allows administrators to track people accessing and editing the company policy files with date, time, and version history data.
  
  

2. Tracking and assessment

The SharePoint automated notification feature informs people within the organization about the updates in enterprise policies and evaluating its benefits by communicating with the leadership team. In addition to it, SharePoint offers the following features to enable accurate tracking and assessment:

• Real-time dashboards: Build detailed dashboards on Excel or Power BI and then import them to the SharePoint CMS. This way, leaders and administrators can get insights on the list of policies, version details, status for approval, and other crucial data. When someone from the leadership updates or approves a new policy, it immediately reflects on the dashboard, notifying all employees of the change.
  
  
• Alerts and notifications: SharePoint can be configured to generate various automated notifications. For example, you can configure automatic notifications that inform employees when a policy or a procedure gets modified, or a new document is added to the system. Furthermore, SharePoint can alert a policy manager when a certain policy needs to be revised or reissued.
  
  
• Assessments: One of the most interesting features of SharePoint includes customized quizzes for employees to assess their policy knowledge. It can also lock the policy read until the employee completes the required assessment tests.
  
  

3. Quick policy creation, distribution, and retrieval 
   

Being a collaborative enterprise platform, SharePoint supports the generation, publication, and distribution of policy content. It supports various content formats like Word documents, images, videos, and audio files. Below are some of the features that help streamline policy document creation and distribution processes: 
 

• Content template: Having a set template on various content types significantly eases up the process of creating new documents like renewed policies. SharePoint allows creating and storing custom templates to save time and maintain consistency while making new policies or updating the existing ones. 
  
  

• Real-time collaboration: SharePoint helps the leadership team with a digital collaborative platform to work on creating new policies and updating the current ones. As teams can work simultaneously in real-time, it reduces the time needed for policy finalization. 
  
  

• Workflows: Build custom, automated workflows for your SharePoint CMS using Power Automate to facilitate smooth approval processes for new policies. Leadership teams can design a new policy and share it across relevant departments for quick reading and approvals. Thus, it streamlines the overall policy life cycle with defined stages from start to finish. 
  
  

• Search: SharePoint speeds up the policy search by enabling search by policy titles, keywords, or even a part of the content. For big enterprises with numerous policies, employees can find the required policy document with SharePoint’s result by relevancy.