Read and Understood safeguards businesses in the Microsoft Modern Workplace, where employees make informed business decisions based on documents published in SharePoint and Teams. Ensuring that new or updated documents are acknowledged as ‘read and understood’ by employees.

The Read and Understood add-in incorporates comprehensive reporting to assist with day-to-day business operations and meet organisational compliance needs. Reports provide an audit history of each document version that is processed, detailing employees who did or did not acknowledge reading. In addition, the audit history is also presented:

In an acknowledgement summary, sent by email to a designated person responsible for a document or group of documents, this details employees who did or did not acknowledge their reading.

As a summary sent to a recipient’s manager. This ensures managers are always aware of their direct reports’ compliance with acknowledging their reading of requested documents, simplifying follow-up tasks on organisation wide and cross departmental ‘acknowledge reading requests’. This option requires additional configuration to allow the Read and Understood add-in access to read Azure Active Directory security group membership and for the manger to be set in Active Directory user accounts.

Flexible Plans to meet your needs

When adding Read and Understood to a site you choose the plan that best suits your reading acknowledgement requirements. A Free plan is available for low use scenarios such as small Microsoft Teams sites.

All plans include a 30-day trial period with no credit card details required.

How Read and Understood works

Simple rules are created to define the documents for which employees are sent ‘acknowledgement reading requests’. Using regional settings in SharePoint at midnight local time, the rules are used to process selected documents. When first installed, Read and Understood operates in a trial mode allowing the rules to be processed on-demand in real-time. This accelerates evaluation of the end-to-end ‘acknowledge reading requests’ process to be completed without waiting several days.

Once the rules are created, all new and updated documents which match a rule are automatically processed to send ‘acknowledgement reading requests’ via email.

What the rules define:

The selection of:

an individual document,

groups of documents by library,

across a site, or

by content type

Which employees will receive ‘acknowledge reading requests’ through a combination of SharePoint groups, Azure Active Directory groups and Active Directory users

The period, in days, over which an ‘acknowledgement reading request’ must be completed

The frequency, in days, after which to send a ‘acknowledge reminder request’ to employees who have not acknowledged reading

Fully customizable email templates that include embedding of SharePoint document column values

When use of SharePoint and/or Azure Active Directory groups are enabled:

Whether Manager Summaries are to be sent

Onboarding - to monitor group membership and send new and re-joining members ‘acknowledgement reading requests’ for all documents selected

The onboarding feature is ideal for improving new hire performance and productivity. Requiring employees to read documents as part of their induction process, where employees move between Departments, join Teams Groups or Project Sites.

Adding the Add-in to a SharePoint site

The person installing the Read and Understood add-in to a SharePoint site needs either Full Control permissions or to be a member of the Site Owner group.

Once the add-in is installed to a site, configuration is simple by following the on-screen instructions. This process can be seen in the video linked below.

Just before you go:

Additional information is available in our documentation at https://readandunderstood.com/download-page

See and read more at https://readandunderstood.com

Thank you!