What is a Document Selector?

Read and Understood Document Selectors define the rules that allows you to:

  • select the document/s targeted,

  • *who receives an acknowledgement request or a notification of change,

  • tailor the email templates that will be sent to users,

  • set, in days, how long users have to complete the acknowledgement request,

  • specify the how many reminder emails are sent to users that are still to acknowledge, and

  • whether to send an overdue email to make the user aware they missed the dead-line.

* introduction of the Column Recipient Addressing feature allows for the addressing of the ‘who recieves…’ to be set directly on the document (file) in the SharePoint Library.

A screenshot of our Document Selector form is located below.

Why use Document Selectors?

Document Selectors provide a low maintenance approach to configuration. For example, we can define the rules with Document Selectors for an entire library and if a new document is added to that library it is immediately added to Read and Understood processing. We believe the content editors, those updating the documents, should need to worry about who should read what - that is a business decission.

How do I set which users get the acknowledgement request?

Within the Document Selector, as part of the email template section is a ‘To’ people picker field where you can set users and/or groups (SharePoint or Azure Active Directory).

When using groups you can include Azure Active Directory Groups and SharePoint Groups, however the Read and Understood App must be configured with necessary access to support either SharePoint or AAD groups.

Working with email templates

To get companies started we provide some out of the box templates to get you started. A rich text editor will help tailor the template to meet your needs or if you wish to build the template using HTML mark-up then you can do that too. The only thing we suggest you change is the company logo image with your own company logo so that users know it is an internal document. More information is provided here…

What if we want users to know a document has been updated but not have to acknowledge the document?

Read and Understood also provides a notification feature where you can let users know a document is updated.

Can we send requests to users without using email?

No, currently you we can only send emails but we are already considering other alternatives such as Microsoft Teams.

Example Document Selector Form:

Document Reading Category.png

Read and Understood Document Selector

The image shows how we define the rules such as how long users will have to acknowledge reading the document, when reminder emails will be sent.

Lastly, we set who should receive the request to acknowledge reading. An email template is provided so companies can apply their own branded emails.

Reading Categories for Library.png

Hierarchical Document Selector Rules

Rules can be defined with an order of precedence. You might create a rule that applies to all documents within a library, however if that library has documents that require a different rule from that applied at library level, then this can be achieved.

The image shows the library rule having an override for documents of a specified Content Type and a single rule for a specific document.