Monthly Industry Trends & Insights from Colligo CEO Tim Brady
Metadata is one of the most important — and most neglected — components of modern content management.
It’s often incomplete. Deferred. Treated as something we’ll “fix later.”
But the longer an organization delays addressing metadata, the longer it delays unlocking better search, stronger governance, automated workflows — and now, effective AI.
Metadata is the fuel behind business processes. And historically, maintaining it has been manual and tedious.
Think about CRM data hygiene. Stale tags. Missing fields. Inaccurate reporting. Now multiply that problem across your entire document and content ecosystem.
That’s not just inefficiency — it’s risk. Poor metadata impacts eDiscovery, compliance, reporting accuracy, and decision-making.
The Legacy Content Problem
At Colligo, we’ve long automated metadata at the point of email ingestion. But we couldn’t previously help organizations that had already migrated large volumes of legacy content into SharePoint.
That’s why we built Metadata Enrich — a tool that retroactively applies and updates metadata across existing SharePoint content.
One recent client had migrated from a legacy email management platform where metadata wasn’t properly indexed in SharePoint. Their legal team relied heavily on metadata for evidentiary requirements. With Metadata Enrich, they were able to tag tens of thousands of emails quickly and accurately — restoring order almost immediately.
Preparing for AI (and What’s Next)
AI may be the future. But metadata is the infrastructure that makes it work. We’ve written previously about why metadata is foundational in the age of AI — and that reality is only accelerating.
Organizations that invest in it now will move faster, operate more confidently, and reduce risk along the way.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Colligo. Think of them as ‘strong opinions, loosely held.’ Proceed with curiosity and a sense of humour!
