Document Repository

Audience: ISMS Admin.

Document Repository is the one container on your ISMS site that your whole organisation can read. It holds the approved PDF of every published document, and nothing else.

You never put anything in it. Certaria builds it, keeps it current, and clears out what no longer applies.

Two libraries, and why there are two

	Policy Masters	Document Repository
Holds	The Word document you edit	The approved PDF your people read
Who can open it	ISMS administrators only	Everyone
Who puts files in it	You, by adopting a template or saving your own	Certaria, on publication
Safe to edit	Yes, this is where you work	No. Certaria overwrites it

A master is a working file. It can be mid edit, mid review, or still carrying placeholders you have not filled in. Showing that to your organisation would put a document in front of people that nobody has approved.

So Certaria freezes a copy at the moment of approval instead. That frozen copy is what your people read, and it does not change again until you approve a new version.

What that buys you at audit

An acknowledgement is evidence that a named person read a specific version of a specific document. That claim only holds if you can still produce what they read.

Because the PDF is frozen on approval and replaced only when you approve again, Certaria can produce it. If your people read the master instead, every edit you made afterwards would quietly rewrite the thing they had confirmed.

How a document gets here

When you set a document to Approved:

1. Certaria converts the file in the root of Policy Masters to PDF.
2. It places that PDF in the root of Document Repository.
3. It builds the document’s reading page: a SharePoint page showing the PDF, with a banner giving the reference and version.
4. It adds the document to the Published Documents list, which is the index your people browse.

Conversion runs only when the master is newer than its PDF, so a sweep that finds nothing changed costs nothing and rewrites nothing.

How a document leaves

Set the status to Superseded or Archived. At the next run Certaria removes the PDF, takes down the reading page, and drops the document from Published Documents.

Setting it back to Draft or Under Review does not remove it, because a document being revised is still the version in force. Retire or replace a document covers that decision.

Never edit or upload here by hand

Everything in Document Repository is generated. Certaria rebuilds a document’s PDF whenever its master changes, so anything you edit is overwritten without warning and without a version you would think to look for.

A file you upload by hand is worse. It has no document record behind it, so it never reaches Published Documents, collects no acknowledgements, and is invisible to your audit pack. It simply sits there looking official.

Edit the master in Policy Masters and let Certaria republish.

If something is missing

A document that is Approved but has no PDF here has almost always failed the publish gate: Certaria could not find its file in the root of Policy Masters. Check approvedButNotPublished on the last run of Certaria: Publish Policies to Site.

Publish a document covers the gate and the rest of the failure modes.