In a recent post, I proudly announced the arrival of K-Docs Approve in the Microsoft Marketplace and in that same post I explained that there are currently 4 products in the K-Docs family group:

• K-Docs Approve: The above-mentioned role-based, state machine solution to track and monitor document approvals.
• K-Docs View: For consumer users who need to quickly find the key documents to do their work.
• K-Docs Publish: When you need to push documents, individually or in balk, to a different site and optionally convert them to PDF or publish Word documents as Site Pages as a SharePoint Modern wiki.
• K-Docs Acknowledge: When you want to build reading lists and record user acknowledgements from as part of a compliance management system.

All these products are Freemium, meaning they are full-functioning solutions which can simply be downloaded and used – you don’ even need to register. You only need to move to a licensed-paid tier if you decide to unlock advanced feature.

There are some obvious synergies with these products as they all relate to some part of the document management lifecycle.

In this post I want describe how these products might fit in with your overall information management architecture but first I would like to explain a few key concepts.

Spaces and Lines

If you have already digested my previous article Spaces and Lines: Fundamental Concepts for Building a Successful Information Architecture in SharePoint you can happily skip this section as it amounts to a key-point summary of what is detailed in that blog post

I argue that conceptually, there are just 3 spaces in which we store documents.

• Above the Line: This is typically what most organisations call their Intranet and is open to all staff members as consumers with read-only access
• Below the Line: These are collaborative working sites which are typically SharePoint Team Sites or MS Teams Sites where users product content and therefor require read and write access.
• Beyond the Line: The Archive space where obsolete records should be preserved.

A common scenario that documents, ultimately destined for the consumer space, are drafted in collaborative working spaces. This implies that there is an approval process. Somebody decides that the draft is ready for consumers. This typically means that the document is “published” so that consuming users can access them.

For the rest of this post, I am going to explain how the K-Docs family of products can be used to support this Information Architecture.

K-Docs Approve

K-Docs Approve is our role-based system for the management and governance of document approvals.

K-Docs Approve is awesome for when you need a formal approval management system. It was built with the idea of providing governance in support of the release (publishing) of Controlled Document versions, but we have customers who use it in other formally managed processes including procurement, contracting and project management.

There can be up 5 distinct roles with corresponding states, although it is entirely possible to simplify things by combining some of the middle roles/states together. For example, in the simplest scenario the Editor might also wear the hat of Reviewer and Quality Controller such that they can send documents to Approvers directly

This makes K-Docs Approve a very flexible solution and because it is built using a state-machine approach rather than a strictly sequential workflow, documents can happily bounce back and forth between states on their way to approval, without anything breaking! It sends notification emails to stakeholders only when their involvement is required, and all interactions are recorded in an audit log.

Another unique feature is that ability to automatically create document rendition when they are approved and push that rendition (a managed copy) to a remote location, usually a library in an above-the-line location such as the Intranet. You can optionally choose for this rendition to be converted to PDF, and it will carry through metadata and Content Type assignments as well. You can even publish a rendition to multiple remote locations simultaneously!

K-Docs View

The UI of SharePoint libraries is largely designed for collaborative working but there are many scenarios (especially in above-the-line spaces) in which users simply need to be information consumers, such as when trying to reference Controlled Documents (policies/procedures etc.). K-Docs View seeks to address the inadequacies of the standard SharePoint approach for consuming users.

Not only does it provide a better interactive experience with dynamic filtering as you click and type, but it introduces a completely new way to navigate lists and libraries using meta data to dynamically build a virtual navigation structure (a tree). You can read more on this concept at D3 Virtual Tree Visualisations of SharePoint Document Libraries

You can view content in the conventional SharePoint way, as data tables (grids) or document cards, but customers who have enable the document map mode, shown above, have received rave reviews from users who find the UX simple, intuitive, efficient and fun even!

K-Docs Publish

This product that has 2 distinct purposes:

• Balk copy documents to a remote location with optional conversion to PDF.
• Conversion of Word documents to SharePoint Modern site page as a wiki article.

Copy Convert

Let’s say you have a collection of documents that you need to copy to a different location i.e. a library on the same site or some other site within your tenancy. Yes, we know that you can do this manually with the standard Modern UI but:

• You can’t automatically convert the copies to be PDF.
• It’s fiddly, as each time you need to use the SharePoint UI to navigate to the desired target location it involves a lot of clicks!

You can use K-Docs Publish to resolve both issues.

• Select one or more document from a SharePoint list view and click the Publish to button
• From the publishing panel select a target location manually or select from a list of preconfigured publishing locations and decide if the documents should be copied on their original source format or converted to PDF.
• Watch in real-time as you selected documents are copied/converted in parallel.
• Check the target location to confirm that the documents have been copied (and converted to PDF as may be required) and that the metadata has been applied successfully at the target location.

The key advantages for K-Docs Publish are:

• Automated conversion to PDF.
• Fast execution – documents are processed in parallel.
• Users can save a publishing configuration for later reuse making the process much more efficient.
• Publishing configuration can be personal or shared with other users.
• Publishing configurations are saved for the site and so can be used from multiple libraries in the same site.
• You can copy/convert up to 100 documents at a time.
• Our metadata mapping solution is more flexible and robust than the standard SharePoint solution.
• Republishing a document will overwrite the current version but (optional) retain it in version history.

Word to Wiki

Back in the day, we built a high successful solution called Word to Wiki. The first version was an on-premises only solution but later we built a version for the cloud called Word to Wiki Online. The basic idea was the same – convert Word documents to wiki web pages. The rationale was that having an online version of documents would make them more readily accessible to consuming users.

Word to Wiki was built for a SharePoint Classic world and the online version was a built as a SharePoint Add-in (no longer supported) but we had requests from customers to provide a replacement solution designed for the SharePoint Modern UX.

The challenge is that SharePoint Modern no longer provides a publishing pages infrastructure and there is no modern equivalent of a Wiki library. In the Modern UX, all pages (and news articles) get stored in the same place, the Site Pages library.

There is an argument to say that wikis are an outdated concept and that we can now rely on AI to help us achieve a business outcome. That may be true, but AI is only as good as the source content that it can access, and that source content must be stored somewhere and a SharePoint site used as a knowledge base might still be an valuable resource. I believe that corporate knowledge bases (wikis) still have their place and remain an invaluable resource for many organisations.

K-Docs Publish can be used automatically convert source Word documents to SharePoint Modern Site Pages and so be used as an online knowledge base. The UI for publishing wiki pages is essentially the same as for publishing other documents except that there is no need to select a target library as all Site Pages are stored in the same place, the Site Pages library. Just select the target site and set the conversion mode to Modern Site Page, as highlighted below.

Published documents can be presented with several configuration options, including:

• An in-document navigation panel on the right (like Wikipedia)
• A quick search and highlight capability
• Expandable/collapsible sections
• Various options and style customisations which control how bullets, tables, images and links are processed.

K-Docs Acknowledge

As part of an overall quality compliance management system, it might not be good enough that users simply have access to the latest Controlled Documents. In some circumstances, especially where safety is a concern, it will be necessary to ensure that users pushed relevant information updates and, in some cases, there may be a need for a formal acknowledgement from users that the organisation has made them aware of such changes.

Say a logistic company runs a fleet of forklift and the management team decide to update the operator procedure in some way that improves safety and reduces maintenance costs. It is not enough to simply update the procedure. In this case, all forklift operators need to be explicitly informed of the procedure change and acknowledge their understanding and willingness to comply.

Users can review their reading list at any time and check which documents they have acknowledged and which are pending.

Managers can check on the acknowledgement status of any document.

The can sent targeted email messages to user who have yet to complete acknowledgements.

A Modern Family

In this article I provided a short summary overview of the K-Docs family of products, each designed to enhance and augment the standard features and capabilities of SharePoint.

K-Docs Approve is used to provide governance when documents must be subject to a formal release and approval mechanism. K-Docs View provides consuming users with an easy way to find and retrieve documents quickly. K-Docs Publish can be used to quick copy documents to a different location and optionally convert them to PDF or publish Word documents a SharePoint Modern wiki. K-Docs Acknowledge is useful in scenarios where you want to target documents to users and groups and request that they provide document acknowledgments – ideal for onboarding or for pushing important updates to Controlled Documents.

As mentioned at the start of this post, all the products are Freemium and can simply be downloaded and used without a paid license. Our hope is that you will feel compelled to upgrade to a paid-license to unlock advanced features, which can be accessed by registering for a user trial at https://kaboodle.software/Trial

If you choose to upgrade (and of course we hope that you will), we offer a considerable discount if you purchase a license for the entire K-Docs product family. You essentially get all K-Docs products (including any future products under development) for the cost of any 2 products purchased individually. Licensed paid customers get free express upgrades and priority technical support.

You can purchase a license online by credit at https://kaboodle.software/Buy or request an invoice and pay by bank transfer.

Visit the K-Docs Product Page and try it today – what have you got to lose?