What Smartbox is

Last updated: 23 July 2026

Welcome to Smartbox

Smartbox is a cloud-based platform for reviewing large sets of documents for data-protection and compliance work. If you have ever faced a folder — or a mailbox, or a shared drive — with thousands of files that someone needs to read, sort, and check for personal or sensitive information, Smartbox is built for exactly that job.

It brings your documents into one place, reads their text, automatically highlights the sensitive data inside them, helps you cut the volume down to what actually matters, lets you redact what needs to be hidden, and gives you structured Workflows for handling requests such as Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs). The goal is simple: take work that would take a team weeks by hand and make it faster, more consistent, and easier to defend — while keeping you firmly in control.

What Smartbox helps you do

Organise your documents in Boxes

Everything in Smartbox lives in a Box — a top-level workspace that holds your documents and folders for a particular matter or project. You can create a Box with a simple Default setup that uses all your organisation's term and pattern lists, or use Advanced options to choose specific categories and lists, set sharing and download permissions, and apply a per-box page limit. A new Box starts empty; once you upload files and Smartbox processes them, your counts and analytics appear. Box names must be unique. See Working with Boxes to get started.

Bring documents in — in almost any format

You can upload a huge range of file types, and Smartbox converts them to PDF so everything looks and searches the same way. PDFs, Word and text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, images and scans, calendar files and web pages are all supported. Email containers such as PST, EML, MSG, MBOX and OLM are expanded into their individual messages, and archives such as ZIP, 7Z, RAR, TAR and GZ are unpacked with their folder structure preserved. Importantly, nothing is dropped silently: if a file can't be converted — because it has no file extension, is an unsupported type, is password-protected, or is a damaged archive — Smartbox keeps it and flags it so you always know it's there. Very long documents are split into roughly 20-page parts, and oversized spreadsheet worksheets are flagged. See Uploading and converting documents.

Automatically detect sensitive data

Once your documents are processed, Smartbox reads the extracted text and highlights likely sensitive information for you. It combines a language engine that recognises many categories of content, pattern matching for shaped data like phone numbers, emails, postcodes and card numbers (card numbers must pass a validity check), and image face-detection that spots the presence of a face — not who the person is. Detected items are grouped into clear categories — Addresses, Names, Identifiers, Locations, Numbers, Organisations and Time — so you can see at a glance what a document contains. Which categories run is configured for your account, and you can add your own Dictionary terms and Regular Expression patterns. See How detection works.

Reduce the volume

Big document sets are full of repetition: exact duplicates, near-duplicates, long email chains that quote each other, and empty or cluttered folders. Smartbox's culling tools group these together so you can set aside what you don't need and focus on the unique material. Culling always produces a report for you to review before anything is deleted. See Reducing volume with culling.

Redact with confidence

When you need to hide sensitive information, you can mark items by drawing over them manually or by bulk-redacting whole detected categories, then finalise. Finalising bakes the redaction into the page so the hidden text is genuinely removed, while your original file is preserved separately. Because finalising is irreversible — and because bulk redaction only ever covers what was detected — Smartbox recommends you always verify the exported PDF by trying to select or search the hidden text. You can map colours and exemption (reason) codes to categories for defensible disclosure. See Redacting documents.

Run compliance Workflows

Workflows turn a repeatable process — like a DSAR — into a reusable template made up of a form, email templates and an ordered set of steps. Each time you run one you get a ticket you can track from Open through to Complete and Archive, with a dashboard to search and filter by owner, workflow and time. A Workflow can even package and deliver a response through a time-limited link with delivery tracking. See Working with Workflows.

Import from Microsoft 365

If your documents live in SharePoint, OneDrive or Exchange, you can import them directly. The import is one-time and read-only — you pick a site and folder, and Smartbox brings a copy in for review. It isn't a live sync, so you re-run it whenever you want to refresh. See Importing from Microsoft 365.

A powerful assist — with you in control

Smartbox is designed to do the heavy lifting, not to replace your judgement. Automatic detection is only ever as good as the text that could be extracted from a document — a poor-quality scan may not be read fully, and the same limit means such content might not be findable in search. Detection works best in English, names are caught conservatively, and any single check can occasionally miss or mis-match. A document always proceeds even if one check couldn't finish, so a partial result can sometimes look clean. That's why review steps are built into every stage — culling produces a report before deletion, bulk redaction covers only what was detected, and finalised redactions should always be verified in the export. Think of Smartbox as a fast, tireless first pass that surfaces what matters, so your team can spend its time on the decisions that need a human.

Where to go next

If you're just getting started, begin with Working with Boxes and Uploading and converting documents, then explore How detection works, Reducing volume with culling, Redacting documents, Working with Workflows and Importing from Microsoft 365. For questions about accounts, roles, sign-in and security, see the articles on users and security.