Confirming that a user has read SharePoint content

Question

I'm setting up a sharepoint site for many users that have to read certain bits of infomation every month. How do I set it up that I get confimation that the users has read the information. It needs to be Confimation that I can document as proof the user has read the information. Any help pointing me in the right direction would be much obliged.. Thanks

Update:

Thanks for the quick response and for everyones help you have all given me some ideas to think about. I know you would never be able to find out if some one had really read some thing or not. I just wanted some thing that the user would click on to say they have read the article and they understood and was aware of certain rule they must adhere too that would produce some sort of document I could store for future reference. Some sort of proof to say the user was shown the document to read.

Just an editorial suggestion, can the title of this question be renamed to something more relevant to the subject? — James Love, May 23 '10 at 22:19
As James suggested, I've changed the title. Rob, please try to make your title descriptive of the problem. You're much more likely to get a good answer! — Marc D Anderson, May 24 '10 at 00:02
Ok I'll make sure I do that next time as I'm sure I'll be using this site quite alot. Thanks for your help — , May 25 '10 at 18:26
Also Rob, please edit your question if you have more information to add. Adding this into the answers section can lose your content in actual answers and make the page hard to follow. Thanks and welcome! :-) — Alex Angas, May 25 '10 at 23:13

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered May 24 '10 at 00:01

There's really no way to be 100% sure that someone reads something, of course, unless you've got electrodes on their head and fancy equipment and scientists. What I might do is just put a button the page which the user can press to attest to the fact that they have read the material. On the button push, I'd use the Web Services to create a list item recording that fact. (If the user has already pushed the button for that particular piece of content, you can disable the button or just not create a second list item.)

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 26 '13 at 12:40

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This has always been a problem - have you looked at Collaboris DocRead? It does exactly this. http://www.collaboris.com/products/policy-and-procedure-management-software. It allows you to send reading tasks to both groups and audiences too.

edited Jan 26 '13 at 12:40

Mark jones

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answered Nov 18 '11 at 08:46

Derek Colley

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This is not working on SharePoint online... – Maciek Oct 18 '19 at 09:30

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 23 '10 at 22:14

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Always a troublesome problem - you might see that they clicked or downloaded it not read it...but anyways if you are using SharePoint Server you might check out Auditing. If you are on SharePoint Foundation the safest way is to check the IIS logs.

answered May 23 '10 at 22:14

Wictor Wilen MCA MCM MVP

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Toni Frankola · Answer 4 · 2010-05-23T23:56:40.663

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I would create a workflow, assign a task to user and then require him to state "Yes, I have read this document!". You can use SharePoint Designer to create such a workflow. It's not ideal, but might work for you.

There is not technical way to check if he actually read something. The closes you can get to that is to check if a document was opened via auditing (as Wictor suggests)

edited May 23 '10 at 23:56

answered May 23 '10 at 23:08

Toni Frankola

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score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 27 '21 at 11:43

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For SharePoint online take a look at Microsoft AppSource Read and Understood for SharePoint

answered Jun 27 '21 at 11:43

Steve Dawkins

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Thanks man. Saved me :) – Grantx Nov 23 '22 at 10:31

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered May 23 '10 at 22:17

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I don't for certain, but is there a chance that Rights Management Services can monitor who has opened a file? Something to look into I think, there may be extra benefit in the other features that RMS offers.

answered May 23 '10 at 22:17

James Love

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score 0 · Answer 7 · answered May 24 '10 at 08:21

You could attach a "collect feedback" worKflow, so the office client integration for office 2007 would be a benifit. Simplest solution is like mark pointed out a custom spd workflow. You have to define what read means... clicked the link... or read the content.

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered May 24 '10 at 15:00

I did something like this on SharePoint 2010 document libraries a few months ago. I used the javascript client object model to create an item in a custom list if a document was clicked (hacking the inbuilt javascript functions and injecting my own code).

Apart from this there is no other way to the best of my knowledge through which you can ensure that the user has really read the document.

Confirming that a user has read SharePoint content

8 Answers8