SolutionsRecords Management
Shared drives that a recordsschedule can actually be applied to.
The Drive AI classifies documents as they arrive, files them by the structure you describe in plain English, and surfaces duplicates, stale folders and version chains for review. It builds the inventory a disposition decision needs. It does not make the decision.
Free to start
In short
How do you apply a records retention schedule to a shared drive?
By classifying records into series when they arrive rather than at cleanup, recording the event that starts each retention clock, and reviewing eligible records on a fixed cadence instead of ad hoc. The obstacle is almost never the schedule. It is that a file system stores a name, a date and a size, none of which is a record series, so the classification work falls to staff who are not records specialists.
What the schedule needs that a shared drive cannot supply
- Which record series a document belongs to, which determines its retention period and is not inferable from a filename.
- When the retention clock started, since clocks usually begin at an event such as matter closure or employee separation rather than at file creation.
- Whether a legal hold, audit or investigation is suspending disposition, which is a fact that lives in email and in people, not in file metadata.
The Drive AI closes the first gap and helps with the second. It reads each document, files it by the structure you describe, and answers questions across connected storage such as which client folders have had no activity since 2022. That produces a reviewable queue rather than a month of manual inventory. Disposition itself stays with the records officer, because the third input is not in the system and never will be.
The problem
What costs you time
ROT nobody has time to sort
Redundant, obsolete and trivial material accumulating because deletion carries risk and retention carries none.
Cleanup collides with a hold
A scheduled drive clean-up run months after it was planned, by someone unaware a matter has since opened.
The drive a retiree left behind
A filing system organized around how one person thought about the job, inherited with thirty days to make sense of it.
Which copy is the record
Eleven copies of a contract in seven places, with no basis in the files themselves for saying which one governs.
How it works
Set up once. It files from then on.
Connect where records already sit
The Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint or Dropbox the department already uses, plus the scanner output folder and the inbox documents arrive in.
Describe the file plan once
Function, then record series, then year, in plain English. Duke recommends structuring by function precisely because it survives reorganizations and staff changes.
New documents classify on arrival
Each one is read, named to your convention and filed into the series it belongs to, at the moment its context is still obvious rather than three years later.
Review a queue, not a drive
"Which matter folders have had no activity since 2022?" produces a list to check against the schedule, with the disposal decision left to you.
What you can ask
Questions, in your own words
- Which matter folders have had no activity since 2022?
- Find every copy of this contract across our drives
- Show me everything we hold relating to this client
- Which folders contain only drafts and no final version?
- Find the scanned records from the 2019 transfer
- What arrived this month that has not been filed?
- Show all documents in this series for the closed fiscal year
- Which departments have files sitting in the inbox unfiled?
What it does
Built for how records management works
Classified on Arrival
Documents are read and filed into the series your file plan defines when they arrive, which is the only moment their context is cheap to determine.
Duplicates and Version Chains Grouped
Copies are compared by content rather than filename, so a file renamed on its way into another folder still groups with its siblings. The groups are presented for review.
Inventory by Question
Ask what a drive holds for one client, matter or period and get an answer in an afternoon rather than a fortnight of manual survey.
Scanned Records Become Searchable
OCR makes paper records and hand-completed forms findable by their contents, which is what makes a legacy backlog navigable at all.
Rules for Every New File
Set the filing rules once and every new document, from the scanner, Gmail or Outlook, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint or Dropbox, is organized by them.
Organize in Place
A browser extension puts The Drive AI inside Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox, so a department organizes and searches where its records already live. Nothing is migrated and existing links keep working.
Naming Applied Consistently
Your convention is applied to arriving files, so the drive stops accumulating scan0001.pdf and document(3).docx faster than anyone can rename them.
Collect Records Without Drive Access
Send a link when a department or vendor owes documents. What comes back is filed by your rules, and what is outstanding stays visible.
For each role
What each person gets
Records Managers get a reviewable disposition queue each quarter instead of an annual cleanup the units never have time to run.
University Archivists find the historical material worth transferring inside a departmental drive, rather than waiting for a department to surface it.
Records Liaisons stop being the lookup table for which series a document belongs to, because classification happens when the document arrives.
Compliance and Audit answer what the organization holds about a matter without commissioning a manual survey of six shared drives.
IT Administrators reduce storage growth by making the redundant material visible, without running a deletion process that could touch records under hold.
Use cases
The jobs this actually does
Apply a Retention Schedule Without Anyone Remembering To
Most retention policies are a document describing what should happen to other documents. Nothing reads it, so nothing happens, and the drive keeps everything forever — which is its own kind of exposure.
Archive/2017/2017-03-02-invoice-northwind.pdfFor disposal/2017-03-02-invoice-northwind.pdf
File Records Into the Right Series as They Arrive
Your retention schedule is written in record series: employment records, financial source documents, contracts, student records. Your shared drive stores a filename, a date and a size. Nothing in the second tells you the first, so a person has to decide, and they decide three years late from a filename.
Inbox/scan0043.pdfContracts/2026-04-02-msa-northwind.pdf
Make Sense of a Drive After the Person Who Built It Leaves
Somebody leaves, and the folders they leave behind are organized around how they personally thought about the job. Nobody else can read it, the person who could is gone, and the clock on reassigning their storage is already running.
From R Mensah/stuff/final ones/doc7.pdfClients/Northwind/2024-11-06-statement-of-work.pdf
Guides
Read the full guide
Compared
Against filing it by hand
Classification on arrival
Content-based duplicate detection
OCR for legacy paper records
Natural language inventory
Works in your existing storage
Automated disposition
Legal hold enforcement
Encryption at rest
FAQ
Questions answered
- Does The Drive AI delete records when a retention period expires?
- No, and this is deliberate rather than a missing feature. A disposition decision depends on facts that are not in the file system, including whether a matter is closed and whether counsel has issued a hold. A tool that applied disposition on a timer would eventually destroy something under hold, and your organization, not the vendor, would carry that. The Drive AI surfaces candidates. A person decides.
- Can it enforce a legal hold?
- No. Whether litigation is reasonably anticipated, which records fall within scope, and when a hold is released are legal judgements made outside any document system. What it does help with is the findability problem underneath: locating every copy of a document and showing what a drive holds about a matter, so a preservation scope can be drawn quickly. Enforcement remains with your legal office.
- Can it identify the official copy of a record?
- It can find and group every copy, including ones renamed on their way into another folder. It cannot designate which is official, because official status comes from your file plan and retention schedule rather than from anything in the file. Two byte-identical documents can differ in status based on who holds them. The grouping is the input to that decision, not the decision.
- How does it know which record series a document belongs to?
- You describe your file plan in plain English once, including the series names your schedule uses, and documents are read and filed against it as they arrive. Anything it cannot place confidently goes to a review folder rather than being filed into a guessed series, since a misclassified record gets the wrong retention period.
- Do we have to migrate our records out of SharePoint or Google Drive?
- No. A browser extension puts The Drive AI inside Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox so records are organized, renamed and searched where they already sit, and workflows can watch SharePoint, Gmail, Outlook, Slack or Teams. Nothing is copied out unless you add a step that does so, and existing links keep working.
- Is it suitable for a public sector or university records office?
- It is used for organizing and finding records, which is the work underneath a schedule rather than the schedule itself. On the compliance questions a public body has to answer, note two things honestly: The Drive AI is CASA Tier 2 certified and a Microsoft Verified Partner, and it holds no records-management-specific certification. Where data may be stored can matter legally, as Concordia notes for Canadian public bodies, so jurisdiction is worth raising with us directly rather than assuming.
- What happens to records we cannot classify?
- They go to a review folder rather than being filed by a guess. This matters more in records work than elsewhere, because an incorrectly classified document inherits the wrong retention period and may be destroyed early or kept long past its disposition date without anyone noticing.
Need to merge, split, compress, or sign a PDF right now? The free browser tools need no sign-up.
Free PDF toolsThe schedule is not the hard part.
Knowing what you hold, and where the copies went, is. Start there.