In this age of rising eDiscovery costs, many small players seem to be getting left out in the cold. Implementation of a traditional full featured enterprise archive happens in response to combined IT and Legal pain that finally exceed the... (read more)

Accessing the history of any department within a branch of government can seem trying at times. For example, the technology used by the Office of the President required end users to decide which emails were necessary for long term preservation, as opposed to storing all of the data, regardless of personal interpretation. Therefore, accessing the unabridged version of the email records for the Republics highest office was hampered by user precision and recall, not technology. Where precision represents the number of correct hits in a return set of specified length; recall represents the number of correct returns relative to the total number of possible correct returns. Specifically, deciding which emails should and shouldn't be kept for long term retention is best left up to software and open records managers. (read more)

Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar "Search and Information Retrieval", as well as an interview we did with Recomminds David Baskin. The first principal is "precision"; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is "recall"; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in "missed expectations" and can be costly in terms of legal risk. (read more)

Getting to the center of a matter by way of custodian and concept searching will improve your legal risk management on a case-by-case basis. However, many mid-sized organizations continue to face challenges in terms of cost and complexity when they want to evaluate email. Estorian LookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and evaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity delivering, making it a valuable solution for the mid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more email than they realize, often exceeding 1-2 terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage thirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the course of 365 days will yield 1.35 terabytes of email. (read more)

According to The Honorable Judge Peter Flynn of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division, Illinois, Meet-and-confer meeting's are supposed to be about putting your IT cards on the table, what one can and cannot do with respect to data, data types, collections, preservations, data transformations, etc. Judge Flynn responded to a question related to guarded sharing of IT capability during meet-and-confer meetings during last weeks live Panel Discussion on Document Review Acceleration, hosted by Epiq Systems. He responded saying it was "Flat dead wrong, sanctionable." According to Judge Flynn, guarding IT and ECA information during meet-and-confers is probably illegal. His response and the participant question make it clear that 'the guarding of information is a competitive advantage in the world of legal wrangling.' (read more)

Since full-text search can only find words or associate concepts with image files, users still need to review the images. The ability to review images as it relates to emails has been overlooked in the major systems, such as Autonomy/Zantaz, Symantec Enterprise Vault, etc. The scenario is simple: your human resources or legal group has a need to do an early case assessment, but some of the critical email data-points are pictures attached to the messages. In most cases, the pictures have obtuse names like DSC30012.JPG or IMG_1459.PNG, telling you absolutely nothing about the file. What you need is a thumbnail view of all images related to your search query. (read more)

Limiting access to archive data is handled by discretionary access controls and user accounts stored in Active Directory™. The success of security in these SaaS systems is largely based on systemic security controls and processes within your company. When you decide to use a SaaS product you must institute new security processes and controls. Those process changes and related costs may go unaccounted for during your assessment of SaaS vs. on-premise email archiving solutions. (read more)

Prior to the release of Estorian LookingGlass v2 there weren't any vendors who could deliver archiving and pre-discovery tools with an intuitive and easy to use package. If you are considering an email archiving and pre-discovery solution you might have looked at Autonomy/Zantaz and Symantec Enterprise Vault, but in either case they are lacking effective pre-discovery tools. For Autonomy/Zantaz you would need Aungate; for Symantec Enterprise Vault you would need Clearwell Systems. Estorian LookingGlass is delivering on both email archiving and pre-discovery tools. (read more)

Estorian's LookingGlass provides a new approach to email archiving for eDiscovery and retrieval. It utilizes the Messaging Application Protocol Interfaces (MAPI) to capture all messaging activity within Microsoft Exchange operating environments. For example, when a user starts to write a message and saves a copy of it in their drafts folder, LookingGlass captures this type of activity and stores these messages into its archive. While a draft copy of an email may mean nothing, sophisticated fraudsters may know how to use associated draft folders to send emails through Microsoft Exchange mailbox delegation without detection. Capturing messages stored in these draft folders controls risk while many other email archiving products typically rely on the antiquated journaling technology found in Microsoft Exchange. (read more)