Forage: AI Data Governance (Coming Soon)

3 min read

Coming soon. Forage is in active development. This page describes where the product is heading; the capabilities below are not yet available.

Forage is a new product joining the Squirrel family. Where Squirrel archives what is old, Forage answers a different question entirely: "What is all this content, and what should happen to it?" It brings AI-driven understanding and lifecycle control to your documents, live and archived alike.

Content search across live and archived documents

Forage lets you find documents by what is inside them, not just their name or location - full-content search that spans your live SharePoint and your archived or tiered content in one place. Ask "where do we hold anything mentioning Project Arterra?" and get every matching document, whether it sits on an active site or was long ago archived to cold storage. No more guessing which library, which site, or whether something was already archived.

AI-powered classification

Forage reads your documents and sorts them into your own categories automatically - sensitive, business-critical, records to retain, or redundant and obsolete content that is just taking up space - with no manual tagging. You define what the categories mean for your organisation; Forage does the reading.

The classification is written back as document metadata, so it is reusable everywhere: it sharpens your searches, it gives Microsoft 365 Copilot better context, and it is what drives the lifecycle rules below.

Policy-driven lifecycle and governance

Once content is classified, Forage can act on it automatically according to your rules - retain records for their required period, move cold content to cheaper storage, and clear out redundant, obsolete, or trivial content that no longer earns its keep. Because the action is driven by what the content is rather than where it happens to sit, your storage stays clean and your retention obligations are met without anyone hand-sorting files.

Auditable, with a dry run and a safety net

Because Forage can act on content, trust is everything - so it is built to be transparent and reversible:

Complete audit trail - every classification and every lifecycle action is logged and exportable for your auditors.
Dry run first - see exactly what would be classified or actioned before anything happens, and approve the first runs by hand.
Acts only when confident - anything uncertain is left for a human to decide.
Recoverable - nothing is removed silently, and nothing is removed that you cannot get back.

That combination - AI understanding plus a full audit trail, a dry run, and a safety net - is what makes automated governance something you can actually turn on.