Synergy Word Document Metadata Updater/Cleaner
The problem
A law firm, which is one of our clients, informed us that the Word documents in their system had extra information like the writer’s name or the company name.
This happened because they used different templates from many places, and this information got mixed into their documents.
The result was that the documents didn’t look uniform or proper.
The law firm also expressed concern about the risk of unintentionally sharing sensitive information with others. The extra details in their Word documents, known as metadata, could include the author’s name or the company name.
If these documents are shared or accessed by outside parties, this metadata could accidentally reveal private information.This is particularly risky for a law firm or any other company that uses documents, where confidentiality is crucial.
Metadata, which includes details such as the author’s name, the organization’s name, document creation and modification dates, and sometimes even tracking changes or comments, can inadvertently reveal more information than intended.
There have been cases where government documents released to the public contained metadata that revealed the original authors or changes made to the document, leading to political repercussions or insights into government operations.
Businesses have accidentally leaked strategic plans, confidential negotiations, or sensitive personnel information through metadata embedded in corporate documents shared externally.
Our client reached out to us to address this issue and ensure their numerous Microsoft Word documents are secure and don’t unintentionally disclose any confidential information.
The solution
We developed a simple to use program that can look through a chosen folder and all its subfolders to find Microsoft Word documents. This program can open each of these Word documents and change the extra details in them (metadata) based on what the user wants. For example, it can update who created the document or which company it belongs to.
An important feature of our application is that even though it saves these changes, it makes sure the document’s ‘last modified’ date and time stay the same as before. This is useful if you don’t want it to look like the document was recently changed.
If our application finds any Word documents that it can’t open or change for some reason, it won’t just ignore them. Instead, it makes a special report file that lists all these documents. This way, you’ll know exactly which ones need extra attention.
Another great thing about our application is that it’s portable. This means you can use it straight away without having to install anything. To use it, you just need to tell it where to start looking for documents – this is the ‘root folder’. Then, you provide the text you want to use to replace the metadata in each Word document.
As with all our software, we’ve made sure this application is safe and trustworthy. It’s digitally signed with our official code signature, which proves it’s really from us. Plus, we’ve uploaded it to VirusTotal, a website that checks for viruses and malware. This means you can be confident that our application is completely free from any harmful software. We fully respect your privacy and assure you that there is absolutely no collection of any data whatsoever.
How to use
Download the application and unzip/save it into a folder.
Edit the file MetadataValues.json , we suggest the free tool Notepad++ ( get it from here )
Set your own meta data and start the applcation: SynergySetWordMetadata
You will get a similar screen:
Open your documents’ folder to check your metadata set:
Open a Word Document to check it’s properites:
In case there are errors, Open the ‘ErrorsFound.txt’ file.
In this specific case the document was corrupted and not able to open.
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