Document sources
Colrows answers questions from your documents. Connect a document source or upload files, and Colrows parses them, indexes them for search, and keeps them in sync - with each document's source permissions preserved. This page covers how to connect sources, which formats are read, and how sync works. To ask questions, see Ask your documents; for who can see what, see Collections & permissions.
Turn on document processing
An administrator enables documents once per organization in Administration → Settings → General with the Enable Document Processing switch. Uploading, connecting sources, and asking questions all require it to be on.
Connect a source
Open Administration → Connections → Documents and add a connection. All three connectors are read only: Colrows reads documents and their permissions, and never writes back.
| Source | How it connects | What it reads |
|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 | Access key and secret (optional session token). Bucket versioning must be enabled. | A bucket, with an optional prefix. Leave the prefix empty to read the whole bucket. |
| Google Drive | A service-account JSON key with the drive.readonly scope. | Files directly in one folder. Subfolders and shortcuts are not followed. |
| Microsoft OneDrive | A Microsoft Entra app (client credentials) with the Graph Files.Read.All permission. | Files directly in one folder, on work or school accounts in the global Microsoft cloud. Personal accounts and national clouds are not supported. |
Each connection targets one document collection. Credentials are stored in your secret manager - Colrows keeps only a reference and never returns the secret to the browser. Use Test Connection before saving.
Upload files directly
Open Consensus → Document Upload and choose Upload. Each upload takes a file and optional Domains, Related databases, and a Description. Uploaded files go into a private collection. The list shows each document's status and refreshes while processing runs.
Formats and parsing
- Supported formats: PDF, DOCX, Markdown, and plain text, up to 32 MiB and 500 pages per file.
- Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are read by exporting them as PDF (subject to Google's export limits).
- Parsing runs locally in a sandboxed process. Tables keep their headers, footnotes stay linked to the text that references them, and pages with no readable text are reported rather than dropped.
- Scanned pages are read with OCR (Tesseract, English). Image and chart contents are not interpreted.
Sync
- On demand: the Sync documents button on a connection pulls changes immediately.
- Scheduled: connected sources re-sync automatically on a recurring schedule.
- Incremental: unchanged files are skipped by S3 version ID, Google Drive revision, or OneDrive eTag.
- Deletions are applied only after a complete scan confirms a file is gone, so an outage or a transient error never removes documents.
- Permissions are refreshed on every scan, so access changes in the source are reflected without reprocessing the file.
Processing status
Each document moves through Queued → Submitted → Processing → Validating → Publishing → Ready, and a document is answerable once it reaches Ready. A failure shows a reason, and a new version of a document is swapped in only after it finishes processing, so questions always run against the last good version.
Group, public, and domain sharing in the source system do not grant Colrows access. Each person is mapped individually. See Collections & permissions.