My vision at Kaboodle Software is to develop a suite of high quality but affordable products that offer genuine business benefits to customers. In this post, I wanted to share how I am turning that vision into reality (or at least how I am planning to) and to announce the release of K-Docs Approve our first SharePoint Framework (SPFx) product into the Microsoft Marketplace.

Insemination

For over a decade, we have been building bespoke solutions for our customers which extend the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint. About 5 years ago we decided to focus more narrowly, so that now, all our solutions are built for SharePoint Online (sometimes branching into MS Teams) using SPFx.

Often, when we deliver these solutions, I think to myself “you cannot be the only organisation in the world who needs this capability” and can spark an internal project to build a more generic product that might be used by other organisations with the idea of ultimately releasing it on the world stage.

I am associated with 2 businesses. KKiT is our sister organisation which focuses on business consultancy, exclusively in the M365 space, and Kaboodle is solely focused on software development. You could say that between them, we cover the whole KKiT and Kaboodle – boom-boom! The work we do at KKiT directly drives the products we develop at Kaboodle.

My point is at that all Kaboodle products are born from genuine business needs originating in the real-world.

Pre-Birth Planning

Taking a product from a localised spot solution to the world stage is not a trivial undertaking. It requires considerable pre-birth planning and means:

• Our products must be rock-solid, tested, secure, stable and responsive.
• Product support documentation must be detailed and comprehensive.
• There is a need to provide a place (a web site) where our customer can browse, discover, download, try and buy our wares.
• We need to figure out a way to monetise our offerings (more on that in a future post).
• And develop products in such a way that customers can trial them for free.
• Getting products listed in the Microsoft Marketplace so that they are more discoverable.
• Providing a customer support plan to deal with the onslaught of new customers that will surely be coming our way.
• Developing and implementing a marketing plan to make sure that they do!

Labour and Delivery

Product development is a labour of love, and delivery can be a painful experience but ultimately one which is totally worthwhile.

We are lucky that over the years (through KKiT) we have wonderful network of early adopters. Not only do these customers find bugs and niggling issues for us to resolve but the constantly supply us with ideas for enhancements and improvements, whether that means adding new features or just tweaking the UI.

However, at some point, we need to draw a line under things (all great artists somehow know instinctively when to stop painting) and get it out there – meaning release it to a wider customer base, which in our world means launching it the Microsoft Marketplace.

Our First Born

I am pleased to announce the arrival of our first born, K-Docs Approve which was delivered last week to the Microsoft Marketplace.

If you are interested in find out more about K-Docs Approve then please visit the product page and feel free to check out these blog posts:

• An Overview of K-Docs Approve
• Getting Started with K-Docs Approve
• Using K-Docs Approve

As with all our offerings, this a Freemium product. This means it is fully functional; you can just download it and use it for free – you don’t even need to register!

You only need to invest in a paid license if you decide to unlock advanced features (visit the product page to find out more).

Family Matters

It is inevitable that some products are related to the same business function, and it therefore makes sense to group these into families. The first family we are working on is K-Docs and initially this will consist of 4 products:

• K-Docs Approve: The above-mentioned first-born. K-Docs Approve makes document approvals easy—no Power Automate workflows required. It’s a role-based, state machine solution to track progress and deliver a seamless experience that feels native to SharePoint.
• K-Docs View: This is our next child. We are expecting delivery (through the Marketplace) within in early November 2025. K-Docs View gives users powerful new ways to explore and interact with SharePoint document libraries. From simple grid and card layouts to rich previews in a side panel, K-Docs View makes it easy to find and use content. Its standout feature is a dynamic map view powered by D3, which lets users build their own navigation trees on the fly by grouping documents by different fields. I have blogged about this already at D3 Virtual Tree Visualisations of SharePoint Document Libraries.
• K-Docs Publish: We are expecting this baby to arrive some time in December 2025. K-Docs Publish makes it easy to distribute documents from working areas to consumer-facing spaces in SharePoint. This solution is perfect for balk publishing approved documents to an intranet and (optionally) converting them to PDF in the process. You can even transform Word documents into SharePoint Modern pages as an online knowledge base or wiki (this is the replacement for our hugely successful Word to Wiki solution which is now retired as it was built as SharePoint Add-in and so is no longer supported by Microsoft).
• K-Docs Acknowledge: This product is the only on in the K-Docs family not currently available from our web site (at the time of writing – but check the link early next year) and we expect it to be available from both our site and the Marketplace in Q1 2026:

K-Docs Acknowledge helps organizations close the loop on critical communications by tracking who has read important documents. Information managers can define targeted reading lists based on SharePoint or Active Directory groups and require users to formally acknowledge that they’ve reviewed the content. All responses are securely logged for audit and compliance reporting.

There are obvious synergies between these products and in my next post I will go into that in more details.

Just so you know, customers who chose to opt for a paid license, get rewarded with a huge bundling discount.

And this is just the K-Docs Family, we have others on the way as well! But I’ll save their story for another day.