Some changes shouldn’t land until the right people have said yes. Foldr Governance puts that sign-off right where your files already live: multi-step approvals, reviewer pools per share, deadlines that escalate themselves, and a record of every request, step and decision, with who decided, when and why. Start with the approvals engine; add Governance when you want files classified by sensitivity and the risky ones routed for review.
Reviews and approvals comes with Foldr Enterprise. Governance is a separate add-on, bundled in no plan, and it includes both the approvals engine and Disclose, so one licence covers classification, review and subject access. On your own appliance these are licence keys.
Governance runs on the same shares, permissions and custom fields as the rest of Foldr. The thing under review is the file itself, the reviewers come from the directory you already use, and the record lives in the same activity log as everything else.
Build a chain of steps, each cleared by any one reviewer, by everyone, or by a quorum of N. A proposed field change is held until its reviewers sign off, and only then does it commit. Nothing lands half-approved.
Match by trigger and priority: a document’s classification, a specific custom-field change, or any change on a share. The rule decides what needs sign-off and who it goes to, so the right items are held and everything else flows straight through.
Assign who approves field changes and who approves classification routing independently, granted globally or per share. A named approver can open the one file they’ve been asked to decide on, and that access ends with their decision.
Give a rule a deadline and name who else should be asked if it passes. When it does, those people are brought in alongside the original reviewers, once. A request is never rejected for lack of an answer, so the deadline nudges rather than decides.
On approve or on reject, set a custom field, notify people, run a MaSH automation (which can move the file, if that’s the next step) or publish the approved version. The decision is the start of the next step, not a dead end.
A requester can never approve their own change. Every request, step and decision is written to the activity log with who decided, when and why, so ‘who approved that?’ has an answer on record rather than in someone’s memory. How long the log is kept is your setting. Approvals waiting on you surface in Shared with me.
A sensitivity label can stop a file being downloaded, copied to another share or emailed out by a script, rather than just sitting there as a tag.
Start from a pack for your regime (GDPR for each EU country and the UK, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI and more). They’re a head start rather than a compliance guarantee, and Foldr says so when you switch one on.
On a governed area, a new link or internal share can be held until a named approver says yes. If nobody could approve it, Foldr tells the sharer up front instead of leaving it in a queue.
A change or a document is held the moment it matches a rule, routed to the right reviewers, and committed only when they sign off.
Author routing rules matched by trigger and priority: a classification, a specific custom-field change, or any change on a share. When something matches, it’s held for review instead of landing straight away, and sent to the reviewer pool you nominated.
Each step clears by any one reviewer, by everyone, or by a quorum of N. A named reviewer can open the one file under review, and only for as long as the request is open. The requester can’t approve their own change, and approvals waiting on someone surface in their Shared with me. In a document or workbook open in Bureau, the approver sees exactly what changed and decides without leaving the file. Approval works on files too: with publishing approval on, everyone but the author keeps seeing the last approved version until a reviewer signs off (on storage that keeps a version for every save).
On approval the change lands; on rejection it doesn’t. Either way, on-approve and on-reject actions can set a field, notify people, run a MaSH automation or publish the approved version, and the whole decision is written to the activity log with who decided, when and why.
Give a rule a deadline and name who else should be asked if it passes. Miss it and those people are brought in alongside the original reviewers, once, and a scheduled sweep does the chasing. Nothing is rejected for lack of an answer, so the deadline nudges rather than decides.
With the Governance add-on, detectors classify files as they’re indexed, by sensitivity or retention category. A classification can itself raise a review, routing a file that looks sensitive to a designated reviewer to confirm or reclassify, through the very same engine.
A subject access or FOI request gets a case with the statutory clock built in, running on this same machinery: collection from your shares and mailboxes, review with reasons, redaction, and a disclosure bundle out the door. More on Disclose below.
A subject access request turns governance from policy into a deadline: someone is entitled to what you hold about them, and the clock starts the day the request arrives. Disclose gives that request a case of its own in Foldr, collects from the sources you point it at, and walks the results through review and redaction to a bundle you can actually send.
Open a case for the request and point it at the shares and mailboxes that could hold something relevant (mail collection stays inside an allow-list your administrator controls). Everything found lands in the case, together, rather than in a folder tree someone assembles by hand.
Work through the results in a single review table, or decide right in the viewer while reading the document. Keep what’s disclosable, exclude what isn’t, record the reason, and have a second pair of eyes sign the case off before anything leaves the building.
Third-party names and details are covered on a converted copy, never on the original, and document metadata is scrubbed on the way out. Grace can suggest what needs covering; a person makes the call.
Generate the disclosure bundle with a manifest of what went out and what was withheld. Disclose ships with the UK regimes built in (subject access under UK GDPR, freedom of information, and social-housing tenant information requests), each with its own statutory clock. The whole case sits on the same audit trail as the rest of Governance.
The approvals engine is the foundation: routing rules, multi-step sign-off, deadlines, on-decision actions and the audit trail. Governance is the add-on that layers classification and policy on top: detectors, sensitivity labelling, retention labels, and the reviews a classification can raise by itself. Foldr doesn’t delete things when a retention period ends; that stays your decision. It rides the same engine, so Governance always includes the approvals underneath, and Disclose comes with it; you never get classification routing without the sign-off that acts on it.
Reviewer pools are assigned globally or per share, and split by job: who approves field changes and who approves classification routing are set independently. An approver can open the one file they’ve been asked to decide on, even if they couldn’t otherwise see it, and that access ends with their decision. Nobody gets a standing grant on the file or the share.
Because a review acts on a real file with real custom fields, the rest of Foldr is right there with it. Captur extracts the fields that a rule keys off. Search and Grace see the same documents and decisions. MaSH runs the moment an approval or rejection lands, routing, reconciling, or kicking off whatever comes next.
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