In this product demonstration, Dr Caspar Roxburgh, general manager of Draftable, walks us through Draftable Clean, a metadata-removal tool the company launched in March this year as a sibling to its Draftable Compare document-comparison product. Roxburgh is candid that he was initially a sceptic about entering a crowded cleaning market, and frames the build as a response to consistent requests from firms who wanted a cleaning solution that sat alongside the comparison tool they already used.
The product has two parts: a desktop application that runs the cleaning process locally, and an Outlook add-in built as a JavaScript add-in for classic and new Outlook. On Draftable’s account nothing is processed online – a point Roxburgh returns to as central to the design, since, he says, firms prefer not to share documents externally when they do not have to. The desktop view scans attachments, assigns each a risk profile, and lets the user drill down through metadata categories to individual document properties before anything is cleaned, with a search across all documents for a given field such as author.
Cleaning is governed by profiles – Draftable’s term for what a comparison user might call rendering sets. The tool ships with three: a Standard Clean that strips everything, a Clean Share that preserves track changes for external sharing, and a Clean Draft that preserves both track changes and comments for internal use. Each field can be set to preserve, remove or replace; Roxburgh demonstrates replacing an author value with a firm name, and notes the same step can be used to strip metadata identifying an AI tool such as ChatGPT or OpenAI.
On recipient-based policy — the demo’s sharpest technical question — Roxburgh confirms that where an email goes to both internal and external recipients, the most restrictive profile governs automatically, which is the only defensible behaviour if mixed-recipient sends are not to become a leak vector. The session also covers send-protection scenarios (blocking a send mid-clean, prompting when track changes or comments are detected, allowing unsupported file types), quality-of-life features such as PDF conversion and attachment renaming and reordering, and the handling of embedded and zipped files.
Asked the forensic question — whether there is a record of what was removed and for whom — Roxburgh is open that an audit log was built, then dropped on an early assumption the market would not want it, and is now being added back in the coming months in response to firm feedback. He is similarly straight that PowerPoint speaker notes, raised as a sending risk, are content rather than metadata and are not currently flagged, an item he undertook to refer to the product team. The roadmap he closes on includes a cloud and email-based architecture to cover mobile and other sending scenarios later this year, deeper iManage and NetDocuments integration, and support for .msg files.
It was confirmed shortly after the session that Draftable Clean will remove PowerPoint Speaker Notes on demand.
Watch the full demo HERE to see Draftable Clean in action.