Archive for the ‘Email Archiving’ Category

I attended a couple of seminars last week - one in Chicago and one in Toronto.  Despite very different audiences (more of a legal flavor in Chicago and more of an IT / messaging administrator flavor in Toronto), the sentiments about eDiscovery were the same…it’s painful.  In fact, an audience member in Toronto said that painful is not the right word to describe eDiscovery.  A better word is “nightmare.”

A recent New York Times article discusses how today’s financial crisis sets up a probable boom in lawsuits. Investors feel wronged by banks and financial advisors.

The creators of some of these risky investment vehicles spoke publicly of how financially sound the vehicles were while (stupidly) emailing each other about how concerned they actually were. (It still amazes me what people will put in an email - completely oblivious to just how discoverable what they write is).

I attended the ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) trade show in Seattle this week. What’s clear to me more than ever is that we are still in an extremely immature market phase for eDiscovery.

First of all, there is a clear disconnect between legal folks, records and information management folks, and IT. Why else would the biggest records management show of the year (ARMA) in Las Vegas take place the same week as the ACC show?

According to eWeek the following 5 businesses are poised to boom during the current financial crisis:

It’s easy to pass off eDiscovery as something only highly litigious or regulated companies have to be concerned about. The financial crisis seems to be reinforcing that assumption.

A recent eWeek article talks about companies (including Mimosa) awaiting a “litigation boom.” While this is not necessarily incorrect, what is not talked about is the many advantages that organizations get from having tools in house to conduct internal investigations.

It matters not whether you are moving from Lotus Notes, GroupWise or even a previous version of Exchange. To move to Exchange Server 2007, you will need to transport your current email to a new Exchange Server. For years I have encouraged companies to take this time to thin out the messaging environments in order to make for a smoother migration but can we easily or even legally determine which items should be discarded?

Message Journaling is a shotgun approach to capturing Exchange messages, period. Because it adds an incredible load on your Microsoft Exchange servers, most administrators only turn it after a problem or issue requires it. By the time you burden your Exchange Server with Message Journaling the moment is gone and the information you need is lost or only on tape.

Interesting numbers put forth by TechRepublic last month:

• Only 25% of companies have policies and procedures for retention and archiving
• 71% of companies don’t provide ESI/eDiscovery training
• 59% of companies archive email but not IM

I can’t say I’m surprised. For those of us in the eDiscovery business, it’s very easy to forget that most people don’t have a clue that eDiscovery even exists, let alone realize how much money is wasted on it due to lack of preparation.

I awoke this morning to an interesting blog posting from a guy I respect a lot - Aaref Hilaly of Clearwell Systems. He’s commenting on the IBM announcement of its eDiscovery Manager. Aaref’s post astutely points out the IBM capabilities as well as product gaps (such as review, tagging, and analysis - conveniently enough, exactly the things that Clearwell provides…of course, I don’t begrudge a vendor conveniently taking advantage of an opportunity to promote itself; after all, I work for a technology vendor).

Even before I began working for an integrated content archiving software provider, I was well aware of the fact that archiving software provides benefits across several spectrums.

There’s saving storage costs by moving information off expensive production storage; there’s eDiscovery savings and risk mitigation by proactively retaining and disposing of information according to policy; and there’s the end-user productivity benefit of allowing workers to save as much information as they need without having to create PSTs or figure other work-arounds to get past quotas. All of these benefits are huge, but there is so much more to the story.