Archive for April, 2009

When considering an email archiving solution, be careful to consider the potential “clutter” it may cause to your existing Exchange environment.  There are three areas to be concerned with.  First, consider how the email archival solution impacts your Exchange Server. Does it use MAPI to remove old email?  If so, this job will consume major amounts of server CPU and memory resources.  Be careful how you deploy MAPI.  Second, consider the potential impact of Exchange journaling, if enabled for email discovery.  Journaling is well known CPU and memory hog and will it double disk I/O requirements.  If you are planning to enable journaling for email discovery, then you should plan on adding a new dedicated Exchange Server to support it.  Finally, consider the impact on the desktops of end users if agents or Outlook plug-ins are required for email archive access. 

The increased adoption of SharePoint into the corporate infrastructure has highlighted a new ESI eDiscovery target in the litigation process. The SharePoint system effectively captures and manages records and revisions. The new SharePoint release touts eDiscovery capabilities that allow the user to search for and find specific SharePoint records in response to a discovery request.

I was out with some prospects this week and was asked why I thought SharePoint archiving would be a hot product.  The first reason is that SharePoint itself is a hot product, and value-add solutions will follow the path that SharePoint blazes.  But the real reason that SharePoint archiving is poised to take of is that IT heads don’t want to make the same mistakes they made a decade ago with email. 

An interesting court decision just appeared that highlights several eDiscovery questions that I have heard in the past raised by corporate counsel. The case in question is Phillip M. Adams & Assoc., LLC v. Dell, Inc., 2009 WL 910801 (D. Utah Mar. 30, 2009) and highlights several points having to do with when notice of litigation is received, litigation hold responsibilities and records retention policies.

Lets continue with the PST elimination blog series.

Earlier this week EMC announced SourceOne, which is positioned as the replacement for its aging email archiving product EmailXtender.  For customers considering this software it is important to understand that this is an brand new product that is unproven and offers limited functionality that customers demand and expect in an enterprise class archiving product in this time and day.

SourceOne offers no:

• comprehensive eDiscovery

(From eDiscoverylaw.com)

White v. Graceland Coll. Ctr. for Prof’l Dev. & Lifelong Learning, Inc., 2009 WL 722056 (D. Kan. Mar. 18, 2009)

In this wrongful termination case, plaintiff discovered discrepancies between certain relevant emails’ sent dates and the creation dates of their attachments. These discrepancies, plaintiff contended, were relevant to the issue of when the decision to terminate her employment was made.