Building a full digital library for my company using SharePoint 2013

Question

Hi all I want to build what I called an “internal digital library” for my organization same as Microsoft MSDN library, the high level requirements are as follow:-

1. To have all our manual procedures, polices, regulation inside a single application, where users with certain privileges are able to view them, edit them, delete them.
   • Of course to publish a document inside the library it might goes though a workflow for approving it.
   • Once the document is publish it can be view, edited, deleted by certain users.

2. Another requirement is to convert all the current work, PDF, images into html web pages. So instead of downloading for example the document regarding the work ethic, it can be a web page where users can create or edit it using rich text editor.

3. Users can search for all the documents and to search for key words.

4. Users who create or approve html pages (for example work ethic web page) can assign keywords for these pages and these keywords should be included in the search.
5. To have versions for all the pages and with audit trail on who/when each version was created.
6. We need to implement certain scenarios , such as if a new employee is hired he should read certain documents and regulations and after that he should electrically confirm that he have read them and his manager & the HR manager will be informed.

Based on the above I have the following questions:-

1. We are planning to use SharePoint 2013 to implement the above high level requirements, so will SharePoint be our right choice?
2. We want to start taking training courses as we did not work on SharePoint before. So my question is on which parts of SharePoint we should concentrate on most to achieve the above requirements ? (from my view we will be using mainly the document management & the workflow features but we need both of them to be fully integrated so the document will be published after going through a workflow), any suggestions ?
3. Does SharePoint easily support the above scenarios mainly numbered 4 & 6 ?.

Best Regards

Answer 1

Based on this, it sounds like you need a Wiki or a publishing site, or possibly both so those are the first places I would focus my studies.

The only real sticking point that I see is your point 6 as there is no way to do this out of the box. The data regarding whether or not a person reviewed an item is available in the SharePoint audit logs but you would have to write a utility that would parse that out and then flag another item with the results. For example, if you have 10 items that must be reviewed, you might create a 'New User Signoff' list that has a Yes/No field for each item to be reviewed but cannot be edited by users. Your backend process could then monitor the audit logs and update the New User Signoff item for that user marking each thing that they've read as a Yes. This could be done with .Net code or even with PowerShell configured as a Scheduled Task.

Other than that, what you describe is pretty standard fare for SharePoint.

Answer 2

I see a long time has passed, but I'd reply since this could be helpful to someone.

Do this on Atlassian Confluence platform instead as it suits the task much better. Wise selection of the toolset saves TCO and improves your reputation among clients.