Another Case of Lost Email

It seems that every day our newspapers carry a story that involves lost email [link:  http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1581643.html] .  This case involves the Governor of North Caroline, his wife and leading officials at North Carolina State University. 

From an IT perspective, the following actions and results from this case are very important to understand:

Well … I needed a catchy title to grab your attention here.  By 2010 80% of organizations is expect to be using SharePoint internally which is starting to bring challenges for maintaining it.  The distributed nature of SharePoint allows for almost unlimited storage growth resulting in SharePoint becoming another dumping ground, just like Exchange and Public Folders became in the past.  So the same approach was taken to SharePoint by many archiving vendors as they did in the past with Exchange.  To prevent excessive storage growth, you archive old data and replace it with a link.  A pretty blunt approach as what many vendors have forgotten when they took shortcuts to offer SharePoint support is how end users actually USE SharePoint.

Exchange 2010 is the next version of Exchange Server and it is due for release the end of 2009 or early 2010.  Exchange 2010 includes many new features and enhancements for archiving. 

Customer have asked me if Exchange 2010 will have all the features they require for email archiving.  I have reviewed the new features of Exchange 2010 and compared them to what I feel are basic requirements for a true email archiving solution, and I identified three key areas where Exchange 2010 falls short.

The new administration in Washington DC has signaled that compliance with industry regulatory requirements will be a top priority in the coming months. How does your company prepare for the upcoming, but still unknown requirements?

The first thing you should do is understand where you are lacking when it comes to corporate best practices, especially around corporate data and retention. Do you have a retention policy and schedule? Have you updated it lately? Have employees been trained on it - regularly?

The eDiscovery case referenced below is a prime example of the how email server backup tapes are still a major target in Discovery and can be extremely costly to produce. When asked to discover two email server backup tapes, the defendants strongly opposed and indicated that searching the two tapes would cost more than $600,000.

The SharePoint content management and collaboration solution has progressed to an impressive solution set in the latest offering. The SharePoint solution set offers unparalleled capabilities for the creation, manipulation and management of huge amounts of data.

One requirement IT professionals and corporate attorney’s should keep in mind is how can they very quickly put a litigation hold in place on ALL (see list below) data within the SharePoint solution that could be responsive to a given eDiscovery request.

When talking about SharePoint recovery you need to understand that there are multiple levels of recovery.    For example, bulk or coarse-grained recovery, that is quite different from item, or fine-grained recovery.   Bulk SharePoint recovery is quite common and is provided by the leading backup products, including Microsoft’s DPM and NTBackup.  But, item level SharePoint restore is another matter to consider.

The benefits of email archiving are storage management, retention and legal discovery.  It is highly likely that you are already using an archiving solution for Microsoft Exchange and perhaps you also archive your network files shares.  But, have you considered the benefits of archiving for SharePoint?

Many of you are still running Exchange 2003 and it is working just fine.  Exchange 2007 is the current active release and Exchange 2010 will be released the end of 2009, according to Microsoft.  The question for many of you is whether or not you should upgrade to Exchange 2007, or simply wait and upgrade directly to Exchange 2010 skipping Exchange 2007 altogether.

Since Mimosa launched NearPoint for SharePoint, an integrated SharePoint archiving and recovery solution, we’ve been talking to many prospects about requirements for their SharePoint initiatives.  As prospects view our product demonstration, one feature keeps on “wowing” them.  It’s the fact that as part of NearPoint for SharePoint’s recovery capabilties, it is possible to restore an individual item with full-fidelity - for example, being able to bring back a deleted document and bring it back with all workflow history and task associated with it.  At first blush, this may not seem all that important, but give it some thought…as a content management system, part of the value of SharePoint is the ability to control content in the context of a business process.  Being able to recover a deleted document is nice; being able to recover just the deleted document you want without having to bring back a full SharePoint environment is even better; but the best-case scenario is to bring that document back with all the rich metadata about how it is used and how it fits into a process and where it’s been within a process history.  This allows IT to provide real value to businesspeople - and to do so in less than 2 minutes with just a couple of clicks.  Exciting stuff!