Archive for August, 2009

Its time to address this expectation from records managers that all records are created equal…They’re not.

How many pieces of paper a day does the average employee create or receive? For me its zero. Now, how many electronic documents, spreadsheets, email, attachments, instant messages, etc. does the average employee create or receive per day? In my case its hundreds of objects and 30-100 MB per day.

Everyone in an organization, especially managing attorneys, need to be aware of and understand their and their company’s responsibilities under the amendments to the federal rules of civil procedure (FRCP) as well as their respective states discovery rules. Any employee can, under specific circumstances, be held personally responsible for destruction of evidence. Now this almost never happen, but knowing what to do with ESI if litigation might or is happening will lower the individual’s as well as the company’s risk and costs.e

At the core of any good archiving solution is the ability to provide users access to their content in ways that do not interrupt their typical processes. Mimosa NearPoint did this well in the Exchange archiving world by providing users access to email directly in Microsoft NearPoint. The same is true with SharePoint content—users can access content seamlessly through stubs, or pointers, to original content. To users, these stubs look the same as original items, as can be seen below.

The SharePoint offering from Microsoft encompasses two products—Windows® SharePoint Services™ (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).

Organizations deploy SharePoint to make information more accessible to end users and to enhance collaboration among work groups.

Recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research on over 1,000 worldwide organizations indicates nearly one out of two respondent companies has deployed or is planning to deploy MOSS.

In choosing an archiving solution for SharePoint, it is important to ask these questions:

The last week I’ve worked on submitting my sessions for some upcoming conferences.

For those that aren’t aware, speakers generally submit sessions 6-9 months ahead of a conference to ensure that there is proper time for editing and creating the appropriate demos. 

The whole release and marketing campaign circus around SharePoint 2010 is in full swing and even at Mimosa Systems we are getting ready to ensure that our customers will enjoy SharePoint 2010 with Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint.

Bow Tie Law’s Blog recently had an interesting piece on litigation holds titled “The Holding Pattern: Lessons Learned on Litigation Holds” where insufficient notices or notices crated in bad faith can jeopardize a case because of the possibility of spoliation of ESI.

I have run across this same problem with past customers that didn’t take the litigation hold responsibility seriously.

I ran across a recent blog post the other day in which the writer states that when Archiving 2.0 arrives, archiving products will not only serve SharePoint, but also capture data from other content sources like email and file servers.

Mimosa offers SharePoint archiving 2.0 already. Combining multiple content sources over point solutions that only serve SharePoint makes sense.

In the case Pinstripe, Inc. v. Manpower, Inc., 2009 WL 2252131 (N.D. Okla. July 29, 2009), the defendant ran afoul of the litigation hold requirement by relying on a manual form of placing litigation holds, e.g. send litigation hold notices out to affected custodians.

The risk in this process is that 1. you have to send the notice out to all potentially affected custodians and 2. you have to be sure they read and understand the notice.

eDiscovery practices and procedures have become a critical area of increased oversight and needed improvements for organizations of any size and in any industry.

The growing body of interpretation of the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the increasing focus on email, SharePoint data and other electronic content in legal cases, and the greater focus on eDiscovery by state courts are all having an impact on how email and electronic content are preserved, managed and utilized in litigation.