BlackCat

Valora’s Metadata Dashboard: Unifying Data Insights with Seamless Metadata Management

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Access and manage all enterprise data through a single pane of glass.

BlackCat integrates seamlessly with PowerHouse to offer a centralized platform for viewing, managing, reporting, and acting on all of your enterprise data. With intuitive dashboards and robust analytics, BlackCat transforms metadata into actionable insights and workflows.

With flexible hosting options, BlackCat serves as the user-friendly front end to PowerHouse and is the central command center for managing large and disparate silos of data across an enterprise. With its rich yet simple display, BlackCat lets users manipulate and manage files via metadata, instead of having to open or even know about every single file that matches their search or retrieval criteria.

BlackCat enables Information Governance, Records & Information Management, eDiscovery, Data Privacy & Compliance teams to defensibly manage your data estate.

BlackCat's user-friendly interface caters to the non-technical IG user.
If you can use online banking, you can use BlackCat.

First Look Dashboard

First Look is a 30,000 foot view of all of your enterprise data, across multiple repositories and locations. Every chart is a metadata field; the contents of the charts are the metadata values. Most Valora clients capture between 50-60 metadata fields from their content.

Interactive charts allow for point-and-click drill down searching by data values. Users customize their view, including which charts they see when they log in.

Documents and files are accessible to BlackCat users either temporarily on their way to other hosted environments, or permanently, as a sophisticated-yet-simple contracts, records or litigation document repository. 

List View

Once users drill down to a subset of data, List View allows them to interact with documents at the individual file level or together as a group. Simple column drag and drop enables custom views of files attributes.

Users quickly see identical and functional duplicates, files past retention, and which files are part of an attachment range, such as emails and attachments. Native files are accessed directly from BlackCat links. 

Document Preview

While BlackCat intentionally does not house a secondary copy of each file, it does offer a preview image, usually the first 1-2 pages, so users visually see and recognize the document, without having to launch it natively.
 
Sensitive content may be redacted in BlackCat based on user access permissions and may also be redacted in the source document, where applicable.

Advanced Search

Whether it is an exploratory search (“What do we have in here?”) or a highly targeted one (Custodian + date range + specific content for a Legal Hold), BlackCat users have multiple searching options including:
  • Point-and-click search: drill-down searching by metadata fields and values.
  • General search: by keyword or phrase across a subset of data.
  • Advanced search: search by multiple content values within specific fields and/or document text.
  • Pre-populated searches:  Setup by Valora’s Professional Services team or other BlackCat users, pre-built searches, bookmarks, filters, and Selection Sets (stored groups of files) are all available.

Action Palette

Users make decisions and take actions on individual documents or document subsets using the Action Palette’s simple point & click toolset. Users can singly or bulk perform the following actions:

  • Edit metadata values, apply & lift Legal Holds
  • Disposition, delete, migrate, or export datasets
  • Receive & approve actions in a workflow
  • Collaborate with others via email, text, and in-app notifications
  • Create, customize, and export on-demand reports and productions

On-Demand Reporting

BlackCat creates custom reports to fit your business processes. Users create, collaborate, edit, and export on-demand reports including:
  • ROT Report
  • Legal Hold Report
  • DSAR Report
  • Retention Report
  • Disposition Report

Chronological Display

Timeline analysis allows users to access, organize and produce document subsets in chronological order. Users choose the appropriate date fields for analysis and select field values to display in the timeline.

Why BlackCat?

Point & Click Dashboard

Interact with point-and-click dashboards to drill down into single files or targeted file subsets based on attributes and metadata tags.

Team Collaboration

Collaborate with other users and colleagues to support approvals and business workflows in classifying, managing, and deleting data. Email and collaborate directly from within BlackCat.

Defensible Disposition

Defensibly protect, quarantine, and delete content throughout the enterprise directly from BlackCat (permission-based, of course).

Complex Search Capabilities

Perform complex searches, data analysis, dispositions, exports and file productions for a variety of use cases, such as litigation holds and productions, DSAR and FOIA request fulfillment, records classification, ROT removal and migrations.

On-Demand Reporting

Monitor document processing, review, and retention status in real-time. Stay updated with automatic notifications, data tracking and auditing.

Activity Tracking & Audit Trails

Work together seamlessly with other users on data approvals, workflows, and document processing, ensuring efficient collaboration. Includes document history and user activity reporting with the option to roll-back decisions and actions.

BlackCat FAQ

How does BlackCat work?

Where PowerHouse is the engine, BlackCat is the cockpit. BlackCat is Valora’s proprietary software platform and is referred to as a Metadata Management Interface. BlackCat brings all the information about your enterprise content into one “single pane of glass” view where users can access, view, search, analyze, action, and report on the extracted text and applied metadata that PowerHouse has processed.  BlackCat presents information at the highest level view (cross-platform, full data estate) and lets users drill down, search, cull, or select down to whatever data subset population is of interest for a particular task or query.

What can users do in BlackCat?

Once PowerHouse has scanned and processed data, users interact with all that data in BlackCat. When a metadata value has been applied, it (and its fielded content) can be searched, actioned, and reported on right in BlackCat.

There are a variety of interactive dashboards and reporting tools in BlackCat including:

  • Dashboard view: interactive point-and-click drill down searching
  • List view:  a list of documents with all fielded metadata values
  • Document preview: preview documents without opening the native file
  • On-demand reporting: point-and-click ROT, Retention, and DSAR reporting (customizable)
  • Chronological reporting: a chronological report of all content in a subset
  • Heatmap reporting: by state, by city (ex. content , data volume, PII risk)

BlackCat users can also:

  • manually edit and apply additional metadata values
  • drill down or use multi-value data searches to create subsets or “selection sets” of data
  • collaborate with other users to support approvals and business workflows
  • perform advanced search and document production for DSAR requests, breach reporting, records disposition, legal holds, and eDiscovery
  • defensibly delete content directly from BlackCat
How do users collaborate in BlackCat?

There are several ways BlackCat users can collaborate with each other and notify others outside of BlackCat. If pulling ROT reports, PII reports, or specific content searches, there are several ways users can collaborate and notify:

  • Human-generated email with link: an email is sent from one user to another with a link to the report for review. This is best for collaborating IG users in BlackCat, the recipient is sent directly to the content view of the sender.
  • System-generated or human-generated email with report: an email is sent to the user with a report attachment in Excel. This is best for employees that do not have access to BlackCat directly. Recipients can see entire list of files and locations and “approve” the disposition of documents with a click in the excel that sends a notification back to the system.
  • System-generated email with link: a notification can be sent to users when a variety of triggers are met. This is best for recurring notifications by content volume (ex. notify me when it gets to 100 GB), by date (ex. notify me every 60 days), or by obsolete reason (ex. notify me when documents expire).

Explore the AutoClassification Suite

Valora’s PowerHouse, BlackCat, and Connectors work together to deliver an integrated Information Governance 
platform to help enterprises understand, manage, repair, govern, action, protect, and report on their data.

Valora’s AutoClassification engine scans, analyzes, and applies customized classification tags and automated disposition rules to all enterprise content.

Valora’s metadata visualization and management tool helps users interact with, manage, collaborate, report on, and action all enterprise data through a “single pane of glass.”

Custom connectors enable PowerHouse to connect to, crawl, analyze, and repair enterprise content within unstructured, structured, and hybrid systems, whether in cloud or on-prem environments.