SmiKar Adds Forage to Squirrel, Making Archived SharePoint Content Searchable and Copilot-Ready

SmiKar Software has launched Forage for Squirrel, a capability that makes live and Squirrel-archived SharePoint Online content searchable in one place and extends Microsoft Copilot to archived documents. The Melbourne-based developer announced the product on November 11, EIN Presswire reported.

How Forage Indexes Live and Archived SharePoint

Forage builds a searchable index from the contents of documents rather than file names or metadata alone. Supported formats include Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, PDFs, Outlook messages, OpenDocument files, CSV, HTML, XML, older Microsoft Office formats and macro-enabled documents. Optical character recognition extends search to scanned PDFs, images and pictures embedded in Office documents.

Results show highlighted text extracts, document names and locations, file types, and sensitivity and retention labels. Administrators can search for a contractual obligation and see matches from an active SharePoint document and a contract archived years earlier without restoring the archived file first.

Forage also answers natural-language questions, such as which contracts contain specific termination conditions, and returns answers with citations that open the source file. Administrators choose to analyse 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 or all matching documents, and larger runs continue in the background. Completed analyses can arrive by email as PDF reports with the supporting documents.

"Archiving shouldn't mean losing visibility of your information," said Mark Smith, Sales Director at SmiKar Software. "Squirrel helps organisations reduce SharePoint storage costs, while Forage ensures their archived content remains searchable, accessible and valuable."

Copilot Access and Sensitive Content Classification

Forage for Copilot lets Microsoft Copilot and Teams retrieve documents indexed by Forage, including content archived by Squirrel and scanned documents processed with OCR. Employees authenticate with their own Microsoft accounts, and Forage checks their SharePoint permissions before releasing document content. Every search and retrieval is recorded against the authenticated user.

Classification rules identify personal and financial information, bank account and payment card details, tax and company identification numbers, passport and identity information, health-related information, and contractual or commercially sensitive content. AI-assisted classification can recommend rules, but recommendations do not change document classifications until administrators review and enable them.

"The goal isn't to replace human judgement with AI," Smith said. "It's to give records and compliance teams the information they need to make better decisions, supported by evidence they can verify."

SmiKar's Microsoft and Azure Track Record

SmiKar's products are built for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, according to akta.pro company records. The company holds registered Microsoft Partner and Azure Marketplace verified vendor status, and its archiving write-path places data directly into customer-owned Azure Blob Storage accounts. The same records cite potential per-gigabyte cost reductions of 90% when inactive SharePoint content moves to Hot, Cool, Cold or Archive tier blob storage, and $2.1 million+ in annual Microsoft 365 SharePoint storage savings documented across three enterprise case studies, with archived volumes ranging from 20 terabytes to over a petabyte.

Forage Alongside Other Content Platform Launches

Hyland unveiled OpenArch on November 10, an open-source content hub available under Apache 2.0 on GitHub that connects repositories such as Alfresco and Nuxeo to AI services without content migration, Third News reported. M-Files launched M-Files for Manufacturing on November 3, a document management solution with Engineering Change Control and Transmittal Management, 3D Printing Industry reported. Glean's October 29 release added automatic channel visibility checks before Slack-triggered webhook and agent channel deliveries, OpenTools reported.

Where Forage Is Available

Forage is integrated into the Squirrel web portal alongside the existing Archive and Security capabilities, with no separate application for administrators. SmiKar said Forage is available to organisations using Squirrel, and the company invites enquiries and demonstration requests through its website.