Like most firms and professionals, you also create a lot of documents in your day-to-day work life. But did you know that you also create metadata? Further, did you know that this metadata can cause a lot of problems for your organisation?
In this article, we briefly touch upon these problems. We also explore a powerful tool called Litera Metadact to safely remove metadata from your documents and protect your organisation from dangerous data leaks and exposures.
What is Metadata in Documents?
Metadata is any information that’s added to a document as you create, modify, or update it. It is auto-created by your word processing software, and includes:
- Comments
- Timestamps
- Tracked changes
- Revision marks
- Document properties
- Headers and footers
- Watermarks
- Company details
- Personal information such as the author’s name
Why is Metadata Important?
Metadata is important, because it helps ensure that a document and its information can be found, used, and re-used. It tells the system – and other users – who created a document and when, which department the author works in, and what the document’s content is all about.
In short, metadata is important for document management, although it’s not usually visible to authors, viewers, or reviewers. But this doesn’t mean that metadata cannot be compromised to harm the organisation. We explore these aspects next.
Why is it Important to Clean Metadata?
Metadata also has a dark side. If revealed to the wrong person or at the wrong time, it can reveal more than you originally intended. This can potentially embarrass, and even seriously damage you and your organisation, especially if it includes Personally Identifiable Information (PII) belonging to you, your firm, or your clients. Specifically, it can damage your firm’s reputation, may result in financial losses or legal action, and may even affect your client relationships and overall profitability.
To avoid such situations, it’s crucial to remove metadata from your documents – especially if the document will be reviewed by or shared with many people. Further, you should remove this data before the file is circulated or shared with others, say, via email.
And the easiest way to do this is with Litera Metadact.
What is Litera Metadact?
In organisations all over the world, users often send emails to the wrong person because their email client (e.g., Outlook) auto-fills the recipients. Even a single such misaddressed email could end up leaking sensitive data and expose the firm to a host of threats from both online and offline sources. Sometimes, users unknowingly send documents with risky hidden metadata that exposes the company to many kinds of risks (see previous section).
Litera Metadact is an easy way to remove metadata from your legal documents – and protect your firm from its many dangers. This world-class metadata scrubbing software combines a simple design with reliable metadata technology.
Metadact is a market-leading server-side solution that can detect and clean 300+ types of metadata on any device. It will remove all hidden metadata from your documents to ensure that you only share content with the appropriate recipients.
With Litera Metadact, you can effortlessly:
- Remove metadata from your legal documents
- Clean up documents and protect them from misuse
- Ensure that you send the right document to the right audience
- Prevent document misuse
You can also prevent email send errors to protect users against common recipient mistakes, like replying to all when Bcc’d or sending emails to personal domains. With Metadact, users will get alerts before they reply to all, respond to BCC or multi-thread messages, or send emails to external addresses.
Metadact provides administrators with DLP-like capabilities so they can block suspicious emails or place them in quarantine to protect the organisation from metadata-related mistakes.
Key Features and Advantages of Litera Metadact
Here are some more features of Metadact that can help you manage metadata and protect your organisation from data leaks:
- Azure Information Protection (AIP) integration handles all file encryption and re-applies document setting labels after cleaning.
- Attachment manager makes it easy to manage and bind attachments, insert automatic cover pages and tables of contents, and add passwords.
- Remove metadata from attachments and reattach a clean version in seconds.
- Safely convert attachments to PDF directly from the email draft.
- In-built third-party security policies extend DLP capabilities through applications like iManage Security Policy Manager.
With Metadact, you can protect your company’s sensitive information. You can also catch email mistakes, suspicious activity, and metadata leaks from any device. And all this without adding complexity to workflows or slowing down senders!
Conclusion
In today’s post-COVID, remote work business landscape, metadata removal is not just an option, but a requirement. Metadact makes it easy to remove potentially sensitive metadata to prevent email send errors, and get better control over your email and document workflows.
