Connect the drives and mailboxes your teams already use. The documents stay where they are and become searchable, governed and answerable from day one.
Most document projects die during the migration, before anyone has seen a result.
The usual sequence is to move everything first and get value afterwards, which puts months of unglamorous work ahead of the first useful day. Connecting a source inverts that: the documents stay where they are and start behaving like governed records immediately.
Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive connect directly, and email is indexed alongside them. Nothing is copied out of its home or reorganised as a condition of connecting.
Once a source is connected, files appear as they are added, without anyone remembering to upload them. The browser extension covers what arrives outside those channels.
Text is indexed, scanned and photographed pages are read, and dates, reference numbers and parties are extracted, so a connected document is as findable as an uploaded one.
A connected document obeys the same view, edit and approve rights as everything else, and search will not surface it to someone without access. Where it came from does not become a way around the rules.
Each record keeps its source, and repeat copies arriving from more than one connected place are detected rather than quietly accumulating. Actions stay in the tamper-evident history.
Everything marked Connected is working now. Anything not on this list should be treated as unsupported rather than assumed — including platforms you would reasonably expect to see.
Connects directly. New files appear without manual uploading and are searchable where they sit.
Connects directly, with the same indexing, extraction and permission handling as everything else.
Connects directly, so a team already working in Microsoft’s drive does not have to leave it.
Indexed alongside documents, so a decision and the thread that produced it are retrievable together.
Organisation-wide mailboxes can be read and searched by administrators, rather than dying with an account.
Save and preview a document without leaving the page it is on, for whatever arrives outside a connected source.
Driven from a spreadsheet, with progress shown as it runs, for when you do want an archive brought in properly.
Not connected today. If your estate runs on it, say so early rather than discovering the gap during a pilot.
Each of these is a reason the first useful day can come before the archive has moved, rather than a year after somebody approved the project.
Committing to move an archive before seeing the system work is a large bet on a small amount of evidence. Connecting one drive produces a working, searchable result in days, which is a far easier thing to get agreement on.
Finance keeps its own drive, operations another, and the decisive correspondence is in somebody’s mail. Connecting all of them makes one search cover the lot without asking any team to give up the tool it prefers.
The reasoning behind a decision usually lives in a thread, and a thread lives in an account. Indexing shared organisation mailboxes means the institution keeps its own correspondence rather than losing it with a leaver.
A record produced from a search is only as good as its provenance. Because each one keeps its source and its history, the answer to "where did this come from" is stored rather than reconstructed from memory.
No, and that is the main argument for connecting rather than importing. A connected Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive folder and indexed email become searchable and governed where they already sit, so the first useful result usually arrives before any migration has been discussed. Bulk import driven from a spreadsheet is there for when you do want an archive brought in properly.
No. The documents stay where they are, under the names and in the folders they already have. Connecting does not reorganise a drive, and it does not require you to fix the folder structure first — which matters, because "we will tidy it up first" is where most of these projects stop.
Yes. A connected document obeys the same view, edit and approve rights as one uploaded directly, and search will not surface it to someone without access. Connecting a source is not a way around permissions, either into the system or out of it.
It is not connected today. It is on the roadmap rather than in the product, and we would rather say so here than have you find out during a pilot. If your estate runs on SharePoint, raise it early and we will be straight about the timeline.
Repeat copies arriving from more than one source are detected rather than accumulating quietly. Nothing is removed automatically — the group is surfaced with each copy’s source and owner, and a person decides what the record should be.
Shared organisation-wide mailboxes can be read and searched by administrators, which covers the common case of correspondence that belongs to the institution rather than to an individual. That is a deliberate boundary: it is about mailboxes the organisation owns, not about reading personal accounts.