- Home
- ISO 9001 document control
Quality management
Supporting ISO 9001 document control
How Ulysses helps quality teams control documented information, and what to confirm before relying on it for your quality management system.
Ulysses supports ISO 9001 document control practices through review and approval workflows, document identification, ownership, review-date visibility and lifecycle actions. It does not make an organisation compliant or certified on its own: effective compliance depends on your procedures, how Ulysses is configured, and the evidence you keep.
Which edition of ISO 9001 applies?
ISO lists ISO 9001:2026, Quality management systems — Requirements as the current edition, published in September 2026, and shows ISO 9001:2015 as withdrawn (checked 8 October 2026).
This page is deliberately edition-neutral. Check the clause wording and transition arrangements that apply to you with your certification body and the licensed text of the standard.
What document control needs to achieve
ISO 9001 expects organisations to control the documented information their quality management system needs, and to keep the amount of documentation appropriate to their size, processes and people. In practice, that comes down to five questions:
- Can staff find the right, current document?
- Can an owner govern changes to it?
- Can approvers see exactly what they are approving?
- Can a replaced document be kept out of normal use?
- Can the organisation reconstruct a decision later?
How Ulysses maps to document control
The table below is a practical framework for evaluating Ulysses, not a conformity assessment.
| Control objective | What Ulysses provides | What to confirm for your process |
|---|---|---|
| Identify and organise | Document number, type, owner, risk rating and review dates appear in the register. | Mandatory fields, unique numbering and what happens when ownership changes. |
| Review and authorise | Review requests, approval requests, and independent or in-order approval routes. | How rejection, delegation and changes after approval are handled. |
| Publish and retrieve | A Publish area and central search across Publish, Native and Archive. | Which version readers see, search permissions and old links. |
| Control changes | Version history is visible in the library; supersede actions replace documents. | Replacement links and how the approved revision is identified. |
| Withdraw and preserve | An obsolete action and a dedicated Archive area. | Access to withdrawn content, retention rules and authorised disposal. |
| Monitor follow-up | Improvement tasks, due dates, next review dates and dashboards. | Status definitions, exception handling and evidence of closure. |
Obsolete, superseded and archived
These terms overlap, so it helps to keep them distinct. Obsolete means withdrawn from use. Superseded means replaced by another approved document or revision. Archived describes where historical content is kept. Ulysses provides obsolete and supersede actions and a dedicated Archive area.
How to evaluate Ulysses for your quality system
The most useful test is a real one. Bring one frequently revised procedure to a demonstration and check, step by step, that:
- a reader finds the approved version, and restricted drafts stay restricted;
- a review leads to an assigned improvement with an owner and a due date;
- an approval route, including a rejection, produces the outcome you expect;
- the published document is the one that was approved;
- the outgoing version is clearly identified once it is superseded or made obsolete.
ISO 9001 certification applies to an organisation’s quality management system, not to a software product, and no software can certify your organisation. We describe how Ulysses supports document control practices; your certification body assesses your quality management system.
See the full list of Ulysses features or read our questions and answers.
See Ulysses with your own documents.
Bring a procedure your team revises often. We will walk through finding it, improving it, approving it and publishing the update.