Read & Understood for SharePoint Online

Sharing a policy is easy. Proving that a specific person read a specific version of it, with a record an auditor will accept, is the part SharePoint and Teams cannot do on their own. Read and Understood closes that gap, natively inside the Microsoft 365 environment you already run.

When a document is created or updated in SharePoint, Read and Understood automatically sends acknowledgement requests to the right people. Staff confirm in one click from Teams, SharePoint, Outlook or email. Every acknowledgement is bound to the exact document version and stored as a tamper-evident, timestamped record outside SharePoint that site owners cannot edit or delete. When an auditor asks who read the safeguarding policy you issued 18 months ago, you answer in two clicks from the document itself: full version history, named individuals, exportable to Excel.

Who it is for

Organisations evidencing policy communication under ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials, CQC, FCA T&C, or UK GDPR: anywhere "we sent it out" is not an acceptable audit answer, and anywhere HR may one day need to prove exactly what an individual was asked to read, and when. Customers include healthcare, pathology, engineering, professional services and government organisations.

Key capabilities

• Secure Document Acknowledgment: Requires Microsoft login authentication for verified acknowledgements
• Automated Requests: Automatic acknowledgement requests when documents are added or updated, with no manual chasing
• One-click acknowledgement: In Teams, SharePoint, Outlook or email
• Tamper-evident audit trail: every record version-bound, timestamped, tied to the user's Entra ID, and retained even after a leaver's account is deleted
• Acknowledgement history: In the document library command bar, drill from any document to a per-version chart of acknowledged and not acknowledged responses, with one-click Excel export
• Per-person compliance evidence: Administrators can pick any employee and view every document they were asked to acknowledge and their response, exported as an evidence report that also proves which documents they were never asked to acknowledge
• Site-wide Excel compliance reports: active versions, full version history and group membership for all employees
• Tamper-evident exports: every report row carries a cryptographic signature. Upload any previously exported report and Read and Understood confirms it has not been altered since export: evidence your auditors can trust years later
• Privacy enforced: individuals see only their own acknowledgement history; the reporting endpoints refuse non-administrator requests outright
• Onboarding of joiners and movers handled automatically: Through group membership new joiners receive required acknowledgement requests, movers are re-targeted with their department
• Teams Activities: one prioritised Activity per person per day, never a flood, with fast-tracked requests notified immediately. Tapping the notification opens the Acknowledge app filtered to the requests
• Unlimited Sites supported: supports all modern sites including individual Teams sites
• Document authoring: Content authors work as they always have in SharePoint, Read and Understood rules determine who needs to acknowledge new or updated documents

Your data, your evidence

Your documents never leave your SharePoint tenant: Read and Understood links to them in place. Acknowledgement records are held in an Azure SQL database dedicated to your organisation (not shared), in a choice of regions and your evidence is exportable at any time.

Pricing

We have pricing options tailored to your needs, documented on our website and all plans include a 30-day trial period (no credit card required).

Installation

To add ‘Read and Understood for SharePoint Online and Teams’, follow our detailed online installation and configuration video at Read and Understood Installation. When first installed, Read and Understood operates in a trial/evaluation, mode allowing the documents to be processed on-demand in real-time, accelerating the evaluation of the end-to-end Acknowledgement process.

Help and support

Use our free consultation offer and schedule a call with one of our SharePoint Consultants to assist the App implementation. Alternatively you can read our FAQs and for any inquiries, contact us at SP Additions Zendesk.