Read-receipts

Confirm exactly who has read each policy — acknowledgment tracked, evidence captured.

Some documents don't just need to be published — they need to be read, and the organization needs to prove it. A new smart-working policy, an updated SOP, a revised safety procedure, a refreshed HIPAA training memo. Publishing is not enough; tracked acknowledgment is what turns publication into compliance evidence. Read-receipts is the piece of the intranet.ai product family that closes that loop — you publish, each recipient acknowledges, and you get a report that proves who read what, when.

Stage 3 · Publish

✓

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At a glance

What you get

Read-receipts is built to answer four questions at once: who has read the document, when, with what identity, and who still hasn't. Each capability below maps to a concrete piece of the acknowledgment workflow, from the moment the email goes out to the moment you export the evidence for your auditor.

Personalized acknowledgment email

Each recipient gets their own link and acknowledgment button — not a shared broadcast.

Timestamped confirmation

Every acknowledgment is recorded against the named Entra identity with a precise timestamp.

Outstanding-recipient dashboard

See at a glance who has read, who hasn't, and nudge pending recipients with one click.

Audit-ready evidence

HIPAA workforce-training evidence, ISO 9001 awareness evidence — exportable on demand.

How it works

Four steps from publish to proof

The workflow plugs into the end of the standard DMS approval flow. Once a document has been approved and published as PDF, the document owner can optionally route it through a read-receipt campaign. The owner never has to build a distribution in a separate tool — the audience is selected inside SharePoint, the email is sent by the product, and the tracking runs to completion without manual follow-up.

Select the audience

Individual users, Microsoft 365 groups, or custom distribution lists — whoever must acknowledge this document.

System sends personalized emails

Each recipient gets a link to the PDF, a short rationale, and an acknowledgment button.

Recipients read and acknowledge

The PDF opens in SharePoint; the acknowledgment button records confirmation with timestamp and identity.

Owner monitors the report

Dashboard view shows completion status. Outstanding recipients can be reminded in one click.

Before / after

What changes when this is on

For the organizations that need this feature, the failure modes it prevents are the ones that turn into audit findings, litigation exposure, or compliance fines. The before/after table below summarizes the four most common patterns customers describe when they move from manual acknowledgment-tracking to the product.

Without it

With intranet.ai

✗ "I never saw the updated policy" as a legitimate defense

✓ Every acknowledgment is attributable to a named user and a specific version

✗ Manual spreadsheet tracking of who has signed off on what

✓ Completion dashboard updates in real time as acknowledgments arrive

✗ HIPAA workforce-training evidence scattered across email threads

✓ One exportable report per policy, ready for the auditor

✗ No way to separate routine announcements from mandatory acknowledgment

✓ Distribution email for routine; read-receipts for the subset that requires proof

Availability

Plan availability

Read-receipts is priced and packaged separately from the core DMS plans because not every customer needs it. Organizations running routine document management without a workforce-acknowledgment obligation can skip it entirely; organizations that must produce HIPAA training evidence, ISO 9001 awareness evidence, or internal policy-acknowledgment records should treat it as part of the essential stack and go with the bundle.

business

enterprise

premium

diamond

— —

Read-receipts is a separately purchased sister product in the intranet.ai family — included in the full-lifecycle bundle, available as an add-on on any DMS plan.

Keep exploring

Related features

Read-receipts fits alongside the publication-stage features that precede it and the governance features that capture the evidence it produces. These three pages explain the neighbors you're most likely to read after this one.

Stage 3 · Publish

PDF publication

Word becomes immutable PDF the moment approval completes — automatically, without a human deciding.

Stage 3 · Publish

Distribution-list notification

The right people learn about the document the moment it's published — automatically, with the link to the approved PDF.

Stage 4 · Govern

Audit log

Every action, every approval, every version — captured against a named user, accessible in 30 seconds.

Deep dive

Read the full narrative

For the buyer who wants the full detail — compliance context, edge cases, adjacent workflows.

Some documents don’t just need to be published — they need to be read, and the organization needs to prove it. A new smart-working policy. An updated SOP. A revised safety procedure. A refreshed HIPAA training memo. Publishing is not enough; tracked acknowledgment is what turns publication into compliance evidence.

Why this matters for compliance

HIPAA requires workforce training on policies — and evidence that training occurred. Read-receipts are a form of that evidence for policy-acknowledgment purposes.

ISO 9001 (and related QMS frameworks) expect that workforce members are aware of the procedures that apply to their work. Acknowledgment tracking produces the evidence of awareness.

General risk management. When a revised policy is published and something goes wrong later, “we didn’t know about the revision” is a defense. Tracked acknowledgment removes it.

Distribution-list email vs. read-receipts

Distribution-list email is fire-and-forget — the document announcement goes out, but reading is not tracked.

Read-receipts add the acknowledgment layer — not only does the announcement go out, but each recipient’s read is recorded.

Most customers use distribution email for routine publications and read-receipts for the subset of policies where documented acknowledgment is required.

How it appears in the DMS flow

At the end of an approval flow, the document owner can either:

Publish quietly — the PDF goes to the public area, no notifications.
Publish with distribution email — announcement goes out, no tracking.
Publish with read-receipts — announcement goes out, acknowledgments tracked, report available.

The three options are configured per document type or chosen per document at publication time.

Deep dive · Pillar guide

The active document lifecycle on SharePoint Online

Why passive document management fails — and what an explicit four-stage lifecycle looks like in practice inside a Microsoft 365 tenant.

22 min read · 5,200 words

Read the full guide

See this feature running on your documents

Thirty minutes. No cost. No obligation. We'll walk through how read-receipts fits into your current document-governance practice.

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