Foldr indexes file names and contents across your SMB file servers, SharePoint, OneDrive and the other storage you connect, runs OCR on scans and images, and searches all of it from one box. By default a result is shown to anyone who can open that location in Foldr (unless it is crawled as each person); on SMB file servers and SharePoint you can switch on per-file permission filtering, so results are filtered against the permissions stored in the index (a revocation can leave names or snippets visible until a successful crawl refreshes them). Match on keywords or on meaning, either way. (How cross-source search and permissions work.)
Three hundred invoices narrowed, grouped and counted just by asking, every change explained and undoable, and a report built from what you found.
We index what a document is about, not just the words on the page. So you can ask the way you’d ask a colleague (“how do we cut delivery costs”, “the contract that auto-renews”) and the right files come back even when they never use those words.
Content is extracted up front by a crawler, so results come from the index, with snippets and the page they came from. (Reading contents is part of the Business plan and up on Foldr Cloud; Essentials searches names and metadata.)
One query hits every storage you’ve connected (file servers, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, S3-compatible and Azure storage, Box, Dropbox and the rest). Results come back ranked, snippeted and permission-filtered.
Text-based PDFs are read directly, no OCR needed. Scans, photos and image-only PDFs go through OCR: Foldr’s own OCR service on Foldr Cloud, your own cloud OCR account if you’d rather, or Tesseract on a self-hosted appliance, where nothing leaves the building. The Trust Centre says where it runs.
Each location has a setting for who sees its results. The default is share permissions: anyone who can use the location sees its hits, unless the location is crawled as each person. Switch on file permissions (captured for SMB file servers and SharePoint sites; OneDrive personal drives and Teams capture none per file) and Foldr filters every query against the permissions stored in the index. A revocation can leave a name or snippet visible until a successful crawl refreshes the stored permissions. On other storage the index has no per-file permissions, so anyone who can use the share can find what’s in it, unless it is crawled as each person. Stored permissions are refreshed as crawling processes files, not instantly.
Search by supplier, status, project code, anything you’ve tagged with a custom field. Combine with full-text in a single query.
Switch on barcode reading for a share and the codes on scanned pages are indexed alongside the text. Scan a packing slip, jump straight to the matching purchase order.
Filter by modified-this-quarter, only PDFs, only over 10MB, only inside the Finance share. Stack filters as you go.
See 300 invoices by supplier and by month, counted over every match, or find the files within ten miles of a place.
Turn on transcription for a share and its recordings are searched like documents; a hit opens the player at the moment the words were spoken. (It’s in the Business and Enterprise plans on Foldr Cloud; a self-hosted appliance brings its own transcription provider. The Trust Centre says where it runs.)
Say what you want changed (“only the PDFs, grouped by supplier”) and Grace changes the search you have open, shows what moved with an Undo, and lets you keep it as a report that recounts every time you open it.
Captur pulls custom fields out of every document. Foldr’s tabular views turn that field data back into a spreadsheet you can sort, filter, pivot and export. A folder of PDFs becomes a queryable dataset, no one re-keying anything.
One row per file, one column per custom field. Sort, filter, scan a hundred documents at a glance.
A field can hold a list: line items on an invoice, parties on a contract, dates on a court bundle. Each value is searchable in its own right.
Roll up multi-value fields across an entire share into a single flat table. Three hundred POs become three thousand line items, ready to slice and total.
Push the tabular view straight to CSV for the spreadsheet, BI tool, or accounting system that already knows how to consume it.
The default behaviour of a corporate search index is to show every user every hit and let the storage layer block the open. That’s a leak: filenames, snippets and document IDs are visible even when the file isn’t. With file permissions switched on (SMB file servers and SharePoint), Foldr stores each file’s permissions when it crawls and filters every query against those stored permissions. The catch (and we’d rather say it here) is that the stored permissions are refreshed as crawling processes files, so a change you make on the storage reaches search after that, not the instant you click save, and until then a name or snippet can stay visible.
Grace answers questions about your files using the same index, scoped to the same permissions. Captur’s extracted fields land in the index too, so structured data and document text are queryable from a single bar.
Try it free for 30 days, no credit card. Or get in touch about self-hosting.
