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Document management is essential for many organizations since documents like policies, procedures, and product overviews are used daily. These documents must be:

• Up-to-date and accurate.
• Easy to access for employees.
• Reliable so employees can trust the information.

This is especially critical in regulated industries where compliance and processes require efficient document control.
​Many organizations using Microsoft 365 rely on SharePoint for managing documents. SharePoint is often the default system for document management, even if the organization has another system in place.

While SharePoint is a powerful tool, it’s not always ideal for managing groups of documents like policies. This guide will explain how you can use SP Marketplace, a document control tool, to set up effective document management in SharePoint.

​What is Document Control?
​Document control is a system of practices, tools, and processes that helps organizations manage documents. It ensures that documents are accurate, up-to-date, and meet specific standards.
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Why is Document Control Important?
Documents are a crucial part of how organizations and employees work. We often:

• Use documents to guide our tasks.
• Create and update documents as part of our jobs.
• Search for documents we need.
• Share documents with others.
• Save different versions of documents.

Many organizations invest time and money to manage their documents better. Controlling specific documents—those employees rely on for operations, compliance, reducing risks, and customer service—is a key part of this process.

To properly control documents, they must be:

• Accurate
• Up-to-date
• Easy to access
• Simple to find
• Useful for decision-making
• Secure
• Always the latest version

Proper control ensures employees can confidently use the right documents at the right time.

What Types of Documents Are Usually Controlled?
Here are examples of documents that organizations often control:

• Policies and procedures
• Guidelines
• Product descriptions or manuals
• How-to guides
• Document templates
• Contracts
• Standard presentations
• Brand assets
• And more!

These are important documents employees rely on, so keeping them organized and updated is essential.

Challenges in Managing Controlled Documents
Managing controlled documents can be tricky, and organizations often face these common challenges:

1. Creating Centralized Access
Employees want a single, trustworthy location to access documents, like policies, and to be confident they’re seeing the latest version. This can be difficult in organizations with multiple sites, departments, and teams creating documents.

2. Finding Documents Easily
Poor search tools, complicated navigation, closed systems, and scattered SharePoint sites can make it hard for employees to locate the documents they need. This wastes time and can lead to employees ignoring important documents.

3. Dealing with Multiple Versions
When employees rely on outdated versions of documents sent through email or stored in file-sharing systems, it creates confusion and undermines trust. Having multiple versions on the intranet can cause employees to use outdated or inaccurate documents, leading to risks for the organization.

4. Encouraging Employees to Read and Act
Even though controlled documents like policies are critical, they’re often not engaging. Getting employees to read these documents—and take necessary actions—can be a challenge. It’s also hard to track who has read a document and whether they’ve acted on it.

5. Managing the Document Lifecycle
Every controlled document has a lifecycle—from creation to revision and eventual replacement. SharePoint often lacks the necessary features to manage documents effectively through all stages of this process.

Addressing these challenges is key to ensuring that controlled documents remain useful, accurate, and accessible to everyone who needs them.

SharePoint's Strengths in Document Management
SharePoint offers many features that make it a popular choice for document management systems (DMS). Many organizations use it as their primary tool for managing documents because of its capabilities, including:

• Flexible document libraries for easy sharing and access.
• Custom folders to help improve document findability.
• A powerful search tool with Microsoft SharePoint Search.
• Granular access control to ensure documents are secure and only visible to the right people.
• Seamless integration with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.
• Built-in version control to keep track of document updates.
• Enterprise-grade security from Microsoft.
• Accessibility support for diverse needs.
• And more!

These features make SharePoint great for general document management. However, SharePoint alone may not fully meet the needs of managing controlled documents. If you want a central repository for controlled documents using only out-of-the-box SharePoint, you might still face challenges like those mentioned earlier.

SharePoint's Limitations in Document Control
While SharePoint is a powerful document management system, it’s not specifically designed for document control. This creates challenges that make it hard to scale and implement document control effectively without extra tools.

1. Missing Key Features
SharePoint lacks many features needed for managing controlled documents, such as:

• Tools for employee attestation.
• Easy lifecycle management for document owners.
• Role-specific views for managers.

Adding these features requires significant effort, costs, technical skills, and time to set up.

2. Decentralized Governance
SharePoint’s design supports a decentralized approach, allowing teams to manage documents their own way. While this can be helpful, it often results in controlled documents being scattered across multiple sites and libraries. This makes it hard for employees to find what they need in a central, reliable location.

3. Lack of Automation
Managing controlled documents involves many steps, like:

• Getting document owners and policy holders to collaborate.
• Notifying employees about document changes.
• Onboarding new staff and ensuring they’ve read required documents.
• Generating reports.

In SharePoint, these tasks often require manual effort. Although automation is possible, it’s complex to set up and usually depends on missing features found in tools like SP Marketplace. For effective document control, organizations often need additional software to bridge these gaps.

​Real-World Uses for Controlled Documents in the Workplace
Effective document control is essential for all organizations, but it’s especially critical in regulated industries. It impacts both compliance and operations. Tools like SP Marketplace are great for managing controlled documents in these settings.

Here are some real-world applications of document control with SP Marketplace:

1. Health and Safety Documentation
Proper control of health and safety documents helps prevent accidents, which can have serious consequences. SP Marketplace provides a cost-effective alternative to expensive document control software, ensuring safety policies are followed.

2. Accurate Product and Service Information
Clients need up-to-date, accurate details about products and services. Without this, businesses risk accusations of misinformation, regulatory violations, and more. SP Marketplace makes it easier to handle these documents, especially in industries like financial services.

3. Compliance in Pharmaceuticals
In the pharmaceutical industry, compliance is vital for everything from marketing and selling medications to managing clinical trials. SP Marketplace helps control and manage the documentation required for these processes.

4. Critical Healthcare Procedures
In healthcare, precise documentation supports patient care. Poorly managed documents can compromise clinical outcomes. SP Marketplace ensures that critical procedures and compliance documents are actively controlled, leaving no room for error.

Using SP Marketplace with SharePoint
While SharePoint is a powerful document management tool, it’s not built for document control. SP Marketplace integrates with SharePoint to provide a complete document control system, making it easier to manage, update, and secure critical documents in regulated industries.

In the current digital landscape, businesses are continuously seeking new methods to optimize their operations, improve collaboration, and boost productivity. In this blog, we’ll dive into the top SharePoint apps that can transform your organization and revolutionize your digital workplace.

If your organization already operates on Microsoft 365, the capabilities are endless. By consolidating your business apps onto a single platform, you can unlock numerous opportunities for increased efficiency, seamless collaboration, and simplified app management. The benefit of this consolidation is not only reduced costs from unnecessary third-party tools but also a more integrated, secure, and user-friendly experience.

By integrating the right tools, your business can streamline cross-departmental collaboration, enhance workflow efficiency, and stay competitive in today’s fast-evolving environment. Whether you’re looking to improve document management, enhance communication, or increase workflow automation, these apps are designed to help your team work smarter, not harder. 

​By adopting these innovative SharePoint solutions, your organization will be well-equipped to thrive in the digital landscape while maximizing the ROI on the Microsoft 365 platform you’re already using.
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Explore the following sections to identify which apps could be a perfect fit for your unique operational needs.​

1. SP Policy Management (backlink to page)​
There are several benefits to using SP Policy Management on Microsoft 365, particularly if your company is already part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Built natively on SharePoint, our solution easily integrates with your current setup, removing the need for complicated third-party applications and simplifying the management, tracking, and updating of policy and compliance management for your organization, that can otherwise be a little chaotic. Furthermore, SP Policy Manager proactively sends out notifications for policy renewals and expirations, ensuring policies remain current and enforced, heightening employee acknowledgements and reducing the risk of legal and compliance conflicts.

2. SP Facilities Management (backlink to page)​
SP Facilities is a cutting-edge SharePoint business app, positioned as a comprehensive operational platform for facilities and asset management, beyond the constraints of conventional standalone work order systems. The is SharePoint business app is designed to automate and simplify the many different procedures related to asset and facilities management and making the lives and efficiency of facilities managers much MUCH easier. Its architecture prioritizes improving employee cooperation and offering a central hub for administrative duties.
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3. SP CRM (backlink to page)
Developed on the Microsoft 365 platform, SP CRM is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that offers a comprehensive view of the sales pipeline and walks users through each step of the business cycle, including opportunity tracking, account management, campaign launch, and lead capture. The productivity of the sales process is increased by SP CRM's seamless connection with your sales team's current workflow, which eliminates the need for separate logins and streamlines everyday tasks. SP CRM seamlessly integrates with your existing Microsoft 365 infrastructure.

4. SP Safety Management (backlink to page)
In contrast to the conventional standalone EHS apps, SP Safety is a cutting-edge business application that is natively built on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, marking the next development in Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) systems. This developed solution integrates a powerful EHS application with a collaboration gateway into your company's infrastructure, making it easier to manage risks, events, compliance, and inspections effectively in a comfortable setting. Better hazard, incident, inspection, and compliance management are made possible by SP Safety's policy management software, which is built to manage environmental health and safety activities effectively while coordinating with company operations.

5. SP Employee Hub (backlink to page)
With the help of over a thousand installations of tested best practices, SP Employee Hub transforms Microsoft 365 into an employee self-service portal structure that gives workers easy access to 90% of the tools they need to complete their jobs. The SP Employee Hub offers employees a user-friendly, customized window into the company, containing News, Announcements, Events, and Links. They can use the "Central Portals" to access documents, business processes, and internal services with just a single click. Establish a standardized procedure for departments to offer an external portal to staff members for documents, events, communications, and services. Every department can customize a standard department template provided by SP Employee Hub.

6. SP IT Helpdesk (backlink to page)​
SP IT Support is a comprehensive IT support solution that goes beyond the capabilities of conventional standalone help desk apps because it is built on Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. A wide range of capabilities, including a helpdesk, change management, IT asset tracking, calendar, conversations, and technical document management, are included in this creative application and are intended to enhance the comprehensive IT support experience. In order to ensure that IT support is more than simply a service but rather an integral component of the business workflow, SharePoint IT Support takes a unique approach by combining business process automation with a collaborative team environment.

In a nutshell, using the appropriate SharePoint apps may drastically improve collaboration, increase productivity, and change the way your business operates. The solutions described in this blog—such as SharePoint Policy Management, SharePoint Facilities Management, SharePoint CRM, SharePoint Safety Management, SharePoint Employee Hub, and SharePoint IT Helpdesk—are designed to effortlessly connect with your existing Microsoft 365 environment. By implementing these technologies, you enable your staff to operate more productively and efficiently while also streamlining procedures. 

As you investigate these applications' potential, keep in mind that adopting cutting-edge solutions is essential to being competitive in the modern digital environment. Take a look and see how SP Marketplace can help your business achieve greater success!