Archive for March, 2009

Just about every week I see another customer who is asking for help with email archive migration.  It makes sense.  Many customers have been running email archival on their Exchange Server for over 5 years and it is time for a new solution.  

I have long felt that trying to archive a remote Microsoft Exchange Server was the wrong thing to do.  For certain, there are problems with capturing data over the wide area network, but there are even more serious problems when searching the archive or restoring a “stubbed” attachment file over the same slow connection. 

The arguments for the under preserving of ESI are well known and varied. The most prevalent argument I hear for under preserving is “the more data, email, files etc. we keep, the higher the risk that it will be used against me in litigation“.

From eDiscoverylaw.com

Court Finds Failure to Implement Litigation Hold Gross Negligence but Declines to Order Adverse Inference where Plaintiffs Failed to Establish Relevance of the Information Destroyed

ACORN v. County of Nassau, 2009 WL 605859 (E.D.N.Y. Mar. 9, 2009)

In Part 1 I discussed where PST files came from and went over the history of the PST files.  In the next few parts I will try to go over some of the technological problems that PST files bring for an organization and the legal problems that PST files cause.

A new ebook, The Know IT All’s Guide to eDiscovery, is now available free from Mimosa Systems.

These days IT folks needs to have a pretty good grasp of eDiscovery requirements–they may need to find specific files that contain certain words sent to or from a particular person and within a specified date range. THis is not easy even for the experienced IT person?

Last week I gave a webinar on PST file consolidation.  Most people are aware of what PST files are as we all have been using them daily since we started to use Exchange and Outlook (or the Exchange Client in the earlier versions of Exchange).   This is the first post in a series that will discuss the history of PST files, the risks of PST files and how to get rid of them from your organization.

The eDiscovery phenomenon is truly worldwide. See this recent posting about new eDiscovery laws in Australia.

Here you can read about new federal rules in Australia that require all email and electronic information be produced and exchanged, preferably in their original formats.

Sounds just like the recent Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) amendments for electronically stored information (ESI) that apply in the United States.

There is an interesting debate forming between the value of archiving and eDiscovery. In this recent article, the author takes the position that archiving is expensive and for the most part, unnecessary, while a full service eDiscovery is the better choice.

After reading this article, I could not disagree more with the author. What the author fails to mention is that the cost of data collection is the most expensive part of discovery.

Today, Mimosa announced NearPoint for SharePoint, our archiving and recovery solution to help organizations enhance their investment in SharePoint. We all know SharePoint is a great tool – it gives users a much better way to collaborate. In a global world full of virtual workers, SharePoint is one of the most important tools on the market. In some of our earlier blogs, we identified some of the challenges with managing SharePoint deployments – Jason Sherry talked about data management challenges like backup and recovery and Martin Tuip explained how storage management can be a challenge.