Forage Questions and Answers
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Does Forage delete anything?
No. Forage does not delete anything.
The disposal half of the product, which will include destruction, is not built yet.
Forage as a whole is in development and in beta testing with customers. Deletion is not part of what is being tested, because it does not exist.
In Settings there is one action that removes data, and it is worth being precise about. Delete them permanently applies to a document type an administrator has switched off. It removes Forage's copy of the text, its search entries and its record that those documents were examined. The documents in SharePoint and in the archive are untouched. A reason is required and is recorded.
Where is our content kept, and does it go to any AI service?
Forage keeps the text it reads, and its search index of that text, inside your own deployment. It sends no document content to any external AI service.
Each customer has its own deployment, with its own database and its own search index. There is no shared index and no path for one customer's query to reach another customer's data.
Does Forage use AI?
Content classification uses no AI model. It uses transparent rules built from phrases, patterns, checksum validation and proximity, and the same document always gives the same result.
Scanned pages are read by optical character recognition models that run inside the deployment.
Do we need Squirrel?
Yes. Forage requires Squirrel and builds its picture of the estate from Squirrel's record. A site or file Squirrel does not record is not seen by Forage, and Forage is only as current as that record.
What can Forage read, and what can it not?
It reads PDF; Word, Excel and PowerPoint files including templates and macro-enabled files; older Office formats; Outlook and standard email messages; and rich text, plain text, CSV, HTML and XML.
It does not read video or audio, binary Excel workbooks, compressed folders or design files. It never removes or bypasses a password or encryption, so protected files are recorded as protected rather than read. Pictures embedded in Office documents are not read.
Older Word and PowerPoint files are read for their text but not their layout. Email attachments are listed by name rather than read inside the message.
See limitations for the full picture.
Can it read scanned documents, and in which languages?
Yes. Scanned PDFs and image files are read with optical character recognition, so scanned contracts and forms become searchable.
Scanned pages are read with an English reader today. In other Latin-script languages accented letters are often dropped or misread, and text in other scripts such as Cyrillic is largely lost. Handwriting is read poorly or not at all.
Forage is being extended to read scanned pages with a stronger model on deployments with a GPU, including rotated pages and languages beyond English.
Does it work with our Purview retention and sensitivity labels?
Search results show the retention label and the sensitivity label that Squirrel recorded for each file.
Forage never applies, changes or removes a label. It does not act on retention labels, and it does not use sensitivity labels in rules or as a search filter.
Who can use it, and who sees search results?
The Records section is used by Squirrel portal administrators. There are no narrower roles today, so anyone who can use the Records section can use every page in it, including search across all content, the rules and the settings.
Search results are not limited to what each person could open in SharePoint. Roles narrower than Full Administrator, and limiting a search to a case, are not yet available.
How does Forage keep up with changes?
Forage asks Squirrel what was added, changed or deleted, on a regular sweep rather than instantly. When a file is reported as changed it compares fingerprints and reads the file again only if the content really changed.
It can be no more current than Squirrel's own record. A file moved into a site without being changed may not be noticed by the sweep; a full re-check of the estate finds it, and is run deliberately.
How long will it take to read our estate?
It depends on the size of the estate and the deployment.
The Dashboard and Coverage pages show progress, and an estimated time to finish at the rate actually achieved. For an estimate against your own estate, ask SmiKar.
How do we find out more?
Contact sales@smikar.com.