Read and Acknowledge
Ask people to confirm they have read something, and be able to say who has not.
Where to find it
On a record, the Documents pane shows a banner while an acknowledgement is outstanding for you. Architect Panel → Data → Document Control has the Awaiting acknowledgement panel.
An acknowledgement is of a version
Not of a document, and this is the whole point. A new approved version starts everybody again.
“I have read the fire policy” is worth very little next to “I have read version 4, the one that changed the evacuation route”.
The audience is a team, and outstanding is worked out
You name security groups rather than people. Who still owes an acknowledgement is computed when asked: the members of those groups, minus the people who have confirmed.
So somebody who joins the team tomorrow owes it tomorrow, and nobody has to reissue anything to anybody.
Nobody asked looks exactly like everybody done
If you only count what is left. So the summary reports the size of the audience separately from the number outstanding, and an audience of zero is called out rather than shown as a clean sheet.
“0 of 0 confirmed” means nobody was ever asked.
Acknowledging is not controlling
It is gated on being able to read the document, not on owning it. Confirming that you have read something is what the audience does, and requiring control permission to do it would mean nobody could.
Chasing goes to the worklist
Outstanding acknowledgements are chased into the tray people already work from rather than only by e-mail, because an acknowledgement is something to do. An e-mail asking somebody to go and find a document is easier to ignore than a task.
It is a record, not a control
Nothing stops somebody clicking without reading. What the system can honestly say is that a named person confirmed a specific version on a specific date, which is what an auditor asks for and all any system of this kind provides.
Worked example
A revised lone-working policy is approved with the whole operations group as its audience. Two weeks later the register shows 74 of 91 confirmed. The seventeen are chased in their worklists, and three of them turn out to have left — which is a leavers-process finding rather than a documents one.
Recommendations
- Set the audience when you submit, not after approval.
- Use groups that are maintained. The list is only as good as the membership.
- Watch for an audience of zero.
- Expect a new version to reset it — that is the feature working.