Archive for June, 2009

Another Case of Lost Email

 It seems that every day our newspapers carry a story that involves lost email.  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. 

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 enterprise archiving solution, and I identified three key areas where Exchange 2010 falls a bit 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.