The Files connection (coming soon)

Not everything in a promo shop lives in a system. Plenty of it lives in a spreadsheet — the supplier price list, the open-order tracker, the season's blanket quotes. The Files connection will let you upload those documents so Scout can read them alongside your mail and your accounting. This is not available today; the card appears in the Connections catalogue under Storage and reads "Docs, Sheets, & PDFs — upload files for Scout to read. Your originals stay read-only."

How it will work

• One Files connection per workspace, owned by the workspace. You upload a file; the upload itself is recorded as a receipt, and each time Scout reads the file it is recorded as a run — the same accounting every other connection gets.
• Five formats to start: .docx, .md, .csv, .pdf and .xlsx. The extension and the actual contents have to agree, so a renamed file is refused rather than misread.
• Scout reads the text layer of a PDF. A scan with no text layer is stored and flagged as needs OCR, and produces nothing — Scout will not guess at an image.
• Encrypted archives, macro-enabled documents and password-protected PDFs are refused.
• What Scout keeps is structured facts with their provenance — this number, from this file, this version — not a searchable copy of your documents.

Where the files live

In private storage that belongs to your workspace. Uploads go straight from your browser to that storage, downloads are single-use links that expire in a minute, and every accepted file records who uploaded it, its size, its type and its version. Scout never edits, re-saves, copies or redistributes your original.

Remove will withdraw access and any evidence drawn from a file immediately, with a thirty-day window in which the file itself could still be restored before it is purged. Retiring the whole connection purges everything with no restore window.

Good to know

• Format checks are not a virus scan. Scout validates that a file is the format it claims to be; it does not claim the file is safe.
• There is no date for this. When the card opens, the padlock becomes a button and this article is replaced with a full walkthrough.
• Live Google Sheets and cloud drives are separate, catalogued, and not available today either. They show under Coming Soon in Connections.