SharePoint Data Classification and Records Management: Forage

Every document you have, searchable. Every sensitive one, found.

Forage reads the documents in SharePoint Online and in your Squirrel archive: the actual words inside PDFs, Office files, emails and scanned pages. It makes all of them searchable in one place. Switch on classification and it finds the ones holding card numbers, bank details, passport numbers or contract terms, and tells you which sites they are in. Then it gives you what an auditor asks for: what was read, what was not, and why.

Forage is the records half of Squirrel. Squirrel archives what is old and leaves a stub behind; Forage makes sure that nothing, archived or live, falls outside what you can search, classify and account for. A records tool that only sees live SharePoint loses sight of content the moment it is archived. Forage was built so that it does not.

One search. Your data. No gaps.

One search for everything. Live SharePoint content and archived content in a single full-text search, with highlighted extracts, filters by location and document type, and every file's name and where it lives. The retention and sensitivity labels Squirrel recorded appear on each result.

Your data stays yours. The text Forage reads, and its search index of that text, stay inside your own deployment. No document content is sent anywhere outside it. Each customer has a deployment of their own, with its own database and its own search index.

Nothing goes missing quietly. Every file is accounted for: read, excluded by type or by policy, or failed with the reason recorded. Coverage is reported against the sites you chose, so the figure you give an auditor is one you can stand behind.

The Forage dashboard: files listed, files searchable, the site being read now, progress across SharePoint and the archive, and the rate per hour

The dashboard answers the first question anyone asks: how much of the estate is searchable, and how long until the rest is.

What you get, in two parts.

Search and coverage. The foundation. Forage reads your documents, makes them searchable across live and archived content, accounts for every file, reports what could not be read and why, tracks progress, emails reports on a schedule, and keeps an audit log of who did what.

Labels and rules. An add-on to the foundation. Content classification: rules that recognise what documents contain, the labels they apply, and search by label. Your administrators write and test the rules themselves, and every finding keeps the words that produced it, so an auditor can see why a file carries a label. Forage can also suggest labels: an AI model that runs inside your own deployment reads the files Forage has read in the sites your administrators choose, groups them by what they contain and suggests a label for each kind of record it finds, for your administrators to accept or reject.

Features: what it does.

Reads the documents, not just the file names. PDF; Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, including templates and macro-enabled files; older Office formats; Outlook and standard email messages; OpenDocument files as LibreOffice and OpenOffice save them; the words on drawings (.dwg) saved in any version of the format from 1984 on and on exchange drawings (.dxf); and rich text, plain text, CSV, HTML and XML. No Microsoft Office or AutoCAD needed on the server. Every cell of an Excel workbook is read, including cells holding only a number or a date.

Scanned documents become searchable. Scanned PDFs and image files are read with optical character recognition, so scanned contracts and forms are findable by their contents. Words in pictures inside Office documents are read too. A page read with low confidence is never left out: its text is kept and marked as a low-confidence reading, so nothing is quietly dropped.

Search that tells you what it could not read. Results carry highlighted extracts, the file's name and full location, when it was modified and its size. A file Forage has listed but not read is still found by its name, and says plainly why it was not read.

A file that could not be read is still found by its name, and the result says why rather than leaving a silent gap.

Content classification, as an add-on. Forage recognises what documents contain, such as bank details, payment card numbers, tax and company identifiers, passport numbers, health information and contract terms. Administrators write, version and test their own rules, and a test run before a rule goes live shows the most it could match and a sample checked with the real rule.

Rules you can explain to an auditor. Rules use phrases, patterns, checksum checks and words that must appear near each other. A rule infers nothing: the same document always gives the same result, and every finding keeps the words that produced it.

Your own labels. Administrators create, edit, retire and reinstate their own content labels, each with a name, a category, a severity and a description. A label in use is retired rather than deleted, so what it found stays listed and explained, and every change is kept in the label's history.

The Forage Labels page: each label with its category, severity, what it means and how many files carry it, and the rules that give them

Each label counts files, not findings, so a document with four card numbers in it counts once.

Labels suggested, people decide. Where content classification is enabled, an administrator can ask Forage to suggest labels for the sites they choose. An AI model that runs inside your own deployment reads the files Forage has read there, groups them by what they contain and suggests a label for each kind of record it finds, such as invoices, packing lists or test reports, with how many files it covers, where they are, example files to open, the keywords a rule would look for and how many files in those sites such a rule would find. Nothing is labelled until a person accepts a suggestion and switches its rule on, a rejected suggestion is not made again, and every decision is recorded in the audit log.

An audit log you can hand over. Settings changes, rule and label changes, site changes, data resets, searches and who made them, documents opened in the portal, reports exported and emailed. No one using Forage, administrators included, can change or remove an entry. It exports to PDF or a spreadsheet.

Reports for a board or an auditor. All your files, sensitive content, labels by file, and files not read with the reason. Each filtered by site and date, exported as a PDF or a spreadsheet, or emailed to the people who need them on a schedule you set.

How Forage works: three moving parts.

Step 1: You choose what's read.

Administrators choose live content, archived content or both, and which document types are read. Every change is recorded with who made it, when and why.

Step 2: Forage reads it.

Archived copies are opened inside your own deployment with your own archive key. For every document it reads, Forage records how it was read, page by page, and keeps a cryptographic fingerprint of the file.

Step 3: It reports what it did.

The dashboard and Coverage page show how much of the estate is searchable, which sites have been read and the rate it is working at. What could not be read is grouped by cause and ranked by how many documents it cost, and says whether the cause lies with the document itself, the copy SharePoint holds, the source or Forage.

What Forage does not do.

We would rather you knew this before a trial than after one.

It does not delete anything. Forage reads your content. It never deletes a document.

It does not change your source content. Forage only reads SharePoint, the archive and Squirrel's records. It does not change, move or delete any source document, and it writes nothing back to Squirrel.

It does not touch Microsoft's labels. Search results show the retention label and the sensitivity label Squirrel recorded for each file, but Forage never applies, changes or removes one, and does not act on retention labels.

Some formats are not read today, including binary Excel workbooks, compressed folders, and design files other than the drawings it reads. They are counted, with the reason, so they appear in reports rather than vanishing.

Exporting search results, including for eDiscovery, is not yet available.

The full list, kept current, is in the Forage limitations documentation.

FAQ: Questions, answered.

Does Forage work on content we have already archived?

Yes, and that is the point of it. Forage reads the content Squirrel has archived, opening the encrypted, compressed archive copies inside your own deployment with your own archive key. Live SharePoint content and archived content appear in one inventory and one search.

Does any of our document content leave our environment?

No. The text Forage reads, and its search index of that text, stay inside your own deployment, and no document content goes to any external AI service. Where an administrator switches on emailed reports, the reports themselves go to the addresses chosen, and they carry figures, file names and site names, never the text inside a file.

How does classification decide what a document contains?

Transparent rules that you can read and change: phrases, patterns, checksum checks such as the Luhn check on a card number, and words that must appear within a set distance of each other. A rule infers nothing. The same document always gives the same result, and every finding keeps the words that produced it, so an auditor can see why a file carries a label. Where you ask for them, an AI model inside your own deployment suggests labels for the kinds of record it finds; it suggests, and a person decides, so no AI decides which label a document gets.

Does Forage use AI?

In one place, and it stays inside. Forage sends no document content to any external AI service. Its one AI model runs inside your own deployment and only suggests labels, when an administrator asks for them. Every label is applied by a transparent rule that a person has switched on, and Forage does not train a model on your content. No AI model reads, describes or summarises documents for users.

Will it slow down SharePoint?

Forage takes its inventory from Squirrel's existing records rather than crawling SharePoint again, and reads documents at a rate its administrators control. When SharePoint asks it to slow down, it backs off and returns gradually.

What does it run on?

Forage is operated by SmiKar as part of the Squirrel platform, with its own deployment per customer: its own database, its own search index, and no path for one customer's query to reach another customer's data.