Entries categorized under “eMail Archive”

As corporations slowly face the consequences of unmanaged information assets, they have started to form ESI retention policies, acquire email archives and other enterprise technologies needed to track and dispose of newly created communications. It is much simpler to enable policy, process and technology to handle the go forward content than to deal with years or decades of accumulated unstructured content. Most public corporations have existing preservation requirements to deal with on top of possible long term retention regulations. (read more)

In many respects, this year's Microsoft Tech-Ed represented an interesting year without the impending march of a new version of Windows or key applications. Since there were no major product announcements from Microsoft this year regarding its major product lines like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server or Windows, users in attendance had other motivations for attending. Some were looking to deepen their knowledge base about existing products from Microsoft and its partners like CommVault, while other individuals were looking for the inside scoop as to what new features Microsoft might include in forthcoming releases of its products. (read more)

The recent Quon v. Arch Wireless decision has raised many questions about a company's ability and right to monitor employee communications. Fortunately, a deeper read shows that the real issues centered around the employee's reasonable expectation of privacy, which a well documented and communicated policy solves handily. So an employee might ask, "I know that the company owns my email, but do they really read it?" (read more)

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the 'secondary benefits' of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality. (read more)

One of the hardest things in a HR investigation is to disprove false accusations of sexual harassment, inappropriate content, fixed bids and many other scenarios. It is very easy to fake printed out email and IM conversations that would not stand up to close scrutiny if still in electronic form. The only way to prove that someone did not send a message is to have all the messages within that time frame and the ability to retrieve them. Think about how hard it is to set the context for an off-color email without having the complete historical conversations between a supervisor and a former employee. (read more)

Enterprise level discovery requires enterprise level technology or by definition it becomes 'unduly burdensome' for any but the smallest cases. Recent opinions from federal judges and appellate courts on both coasts have made it clear that the discovery process, technology and personnel are under increasing scrutiny. Plaintiff's counsel are reading the same opinions from Judge John Facciola (United States v. O'Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14 (D.D.C. 2008)) and the 9th Circuit (Quon v. Arch Wireless). Many will interpret them as a signal to initiate Daubert style hearings to force corporations to defend their search engines, communication systems and the discovery effort in response to discovery demands. (read more)

The 9th Circuit of Appeals reversed a district court ruling, Quon v. Arch Wireless, in which a wireless text messaging service turned over message transcripts to their customer, the Ontario Police Department, during an investigation on an officer's excessive use of the department provided pager. The fact pattern has some twists and turns, but buried within the opinion are issues that are worth exploring for every corporation contemplating out-sourcing their communications via SaaS or other external provider. (read more)

There is a growing perception among those who are intimately involved with information management that the discipline of information management is changing. The fact that it is changing comes as no surprise to anyone as everyone knows that a change has to occur. The question is, "Is this just an evolutionary change or is a paradigm shift in information management about to occur?" (read more)

Keywords are easy to understand and even easier to misuse. Beyond the science of 'precision and recall' there needs to be process, communication and metrics to reach the standard of reasonable due diligence, this 'comfort level' that Judge Grimm cites. The process needs to identify the known exceptions to your chosen technology. Have you asked or tested for the ability to search across different formats of email, files, databases, images, voice, video and languages? Do you even know the composition of your ESI collection and how that will affect any searches? (read more)

All of this does not mean that it is impossible to conduct a reasonable, defensible search, preservation or collection. Instead it points out the need to understand your environment and to document the efforts made to test and analyze the capabilities and exceptions of potential eDiscovery technology before putting them to use. With more innovative CIO's looking to implement enterprise search and analytics, it is critical that the legal department collaborates on the system requirements and testing process. (read more)

So when you are shopping for a solution to your growing messaging environment, remember to make sure that the solution you pick will not turn into the retention nightmare down the road. Ask the hard questions about retention management, migration strategies and storage formats. (read more)

Back in the dark old days of purely paper productions, which is only 8-10 years ago, no one wanted to open the Pandora's box and talk about email and other ESI. Instead, they asked the custodians to simply print out everything relevant and deliver it with the rest of the 'records'. Imagine the inefficiency of a senior vice president staying late to print a year's worth of manually selected email. Then the vendor made three or more copies for internal, external and expert review. The story gets worse from there, but that is supposed to be old news. I remember a client telling me, "We don't ask about email and they don't ask about email. Get it?" (read more)

A conceptual engine essentially lets the ESI talk for itself. Rather than a person creating a search from their preconceptions of what criteria will retrieve all items related to a given request, the systems analyze and present the items back as folders, dot clusters and other visual diagrams to help the user make sense of the complex relationships. All of this sounds like just what the attorney asked for. "Give me everything relating to this deal." (read more)

Knowing that one can search digitized conversations, the next question is can users effectively search everything within the enterprise system from unified federated search? There is little doubt that the archiving systems are aggressively pursuing acquisitions, partnerships and development to enable ingestion and indexing of every conceivable data stream. All of them started with email back in the late 1990's. For example, Symantec doesn't have audio, but jumped ahead with early products to handle IM, file shares, Sharepoint through merger and acquisition. (read more)

In this age of rising eDiscovery costs, many small players seem to be getting left out in the cold. Implementation of a traditional full featured enterprise archive happens in response to combined IT and Legal pain that finally exceed the threshold and cut lose the capitol budget to reign in bloated Exchange environments and service provider profits. But selecting the right solution for a large public company or governmental agency is an entirely different process from the immediate needs of the SMB market and smaller state or county entities. Recent changes in the dominant archive platforms seem to acknowledge this reality as some of them raise the minimum target sale and focus their channel on large enterprise sales. (read more)

Accessing the history of any department within a branch of government can seem trying at times. For example, the technology used by the Office of the President required end users to decide which emails were necessary for long term preservation, as opposed to storing all of the data, regardless of personal interpretation. Therefore, accessing the unabridged version of the email records for the Republics highest office was hampered by user precision and recall, not technology. Where precision represents the number of correct hits in a return set of specified length; recall represents the number of correct returns relative to the total number of possible correct returns. Specifically, deciding which emails should and shouldn't be kept for long term retention is best left up to software and open records managers. (read more)

Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar "Search and Information Retrieval", as well as an interview we did with Recomminds David Baskin. The first principal is "precision"; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is "recall"; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in "missed expectations" and can be costly in terms of legal risk. (read more)

Getting to the center of a matter by way of custodian and concept searching will improve your legal risk management on a case-by-case basis. However, many mid-sized organizations continue to face challenges in terms of cost and complexity when they want to evaluate email. Estorian LookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and evaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity delivering, making it a valuable solution for the mid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more email than they realize, often exceeding 1-2 terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage thirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the course of 365 days will yield 1.35 terabytes of email. (read more)

According to The Honorable Judge Peter Flynn of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division, Illinois, Meet-and-confer meeting's are supposed to be about putting your IT cards on the table, what one can and cannot do with respect to data, data types, collections, preservations, data transformations, etc. Judge Flynn responded to a question related to guarded sharing of IT capability during meet-and-confer meetings during last weeks live Panel Discussion on Document Review Acceleration, hosted by Epiq Systems. He responded saying it was "Flat dead wrong, sanctionable." According to Judge Flynn, guarding IT and ECA information during meet-and-confers is probably illegal. His response and the participant question make it clear that 'the guarding of information is a competitive advantage in the world of legal wrangling.' (read more)

Since full-text search can only find words or associate concepts with image files, users still need to review the images. The ability to review images as it relates to emails has been overlooked in the major systems, such as Autonomy/Zantaz, Symantec Enterprise Vault, etc. The scenario is simple: your human resources or legal group has a need to do an early case assessment, but some of the critical email data-points are pictures attached to the messages. In most cases, the pictures have obtuse names like DSC30012.JPG or IMG_1459.PNG, telling you absolutely nothing about the file. What you need is a thumbnail view of all images related to your search query. (read more)

This situation peaked my interest because it was an email archiving product for gmail. Specifically, the application is an end user archiving product called g-archiver. The product works by accessing a users gmail.com mailbox account and copying all their email to a local device. In order to copy the email from gmail.com the product requires that a user input their username and password. (Note: Here is the URL to download the product - www.brothersoft.com/g-archiver-58027.html) (read more)

Limiting access to archive data is handled by discretionary access controls and user accounts stored in Active Directory™. The success of security in these SaaS systems is largely based on systemic security controls and processes within your company. When you decide to use a SaaS product you must institute new security processes and controls. Those process changes and related costs may go unaccounted for during your assessment of SaaS vs. on-premise email archiving solutions. (read more)

Infinite. That's the number of files that the file system on ProStor Systems' InfiniVault archiving appliance can theoretically support. The problem with InfiniVault supporting an infinite number of files is how does that work under real-world conditions and how does anyone verify that number in order to have some level of assurance that it holds up? In ProStor Systems case, verifying its claim is more important than in the case of most other disk vendors since its disk-based InfiniVault also supports infinite storage capacity. (read more)

Autonomy/Zantaz, Microsoft/Fortiva and Google/Postini are three SaaS based archiving solutions you should evaluate if you are considering hosted email archiving and eDiscovery for Microsoft Exchange. Since Microsoft/Fortiva does not support Lotus Notes Domino, you should limit your research to Autonomy and Google if you also require Lotus Notes Domino support. Autonomy's Zantaz was founded on the premise of SaaS archiving for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes Domino, whereas Google/Postini started offering it in 2006. Google acquired Postini in 2007 and added significant support and data center services to support their growing Enterprise customer base. (read more)

Prior to the release of Estorian LookingGlass v2 there weren't any vendors who could deliver archiving and pre-discovery tools with an intuitive and easy to use package. If you are considering an email archiving and pre-discovery solution you might have looked at Autonomy/Zantaz and Symantec Enterprise Vault, but in either case they are lacking effective pre-discovery tools. For Autonomy/Zantaz you would need Aungate; for Symantec Enterprise Vault you would need Clearwell Systems. Estorian LookingGlass is delivering on both email archiving and pre-discovery tools. (read more)