Before we delve into managing your policies, it's worth noting how policies and procedures should be structured and formatted when they are entered into your site.

Whereas you may have seen policy documents that are tens of pages long, in our platform we split up the different sections of a policy into sub-articles.  That way the policy is navigated using the navigation list on the left side, while viewing the section content in the article body on the right hand side. Each article is a separate page, with its own URL and history, in the system.

This is important not just to make the system easy to navigate, but as articles are being edited by a user they are locked for editing so other users cannot edit them. In order to allow multiple people to edit the Policy and Procedures guide at once, you want to make sure that only a small section of the guide is locked for editing at a time.

Because of this, articles should usually be relatively short. If the article is getting too long, please consider creating sub-articles under that article. There is no practical limit to how many sub-articles deep you can go. [*]

Note: You can also now upload PDFs or Word documents into articles using the PDF/Word toolbar button in the editor, which shows the PDF/Word document in the article itself. This can be a useful way to include larger articles, but you lose some of the navigation and other functionality when using PDFs instead of putting content in directly.

Also, try to limit the number of articles at any one level to no more than 50 articles. Our usability tests have shown that users have an easier time navigating through a hierarchy without losing their location when each level doesn't have too many articles.

Often, the principal way that users will find articles is through the search feature. Because the search feature will find articles that are many levels deep, you can structure your policies hierarchically without worrying about the article being difficult for the user to find.