Entries categorized under “Search”

One of the hardest things in a HR investigation is to disprove false accusations of sexual harassment, inappropriate content, fixed bids and many other scenarios. It is very easy to fake printed out email and IM conversations that would not stand up to close scrutiny if still in electronic form. The only way to prove that someone did not send a message is to have all the messages within that time frame and the ability to retrieve them. Think about how hard it is to set the context for an off-color email without having the complete historical conversations between a supervisor and a former employee. (read more)

Enterprise level discovery requires enterprise level technology or by definition it becomes 'unduly burdensome' for any but the smallest cases. Recent opinions from federal judges and appellate courts on both coasts have made it clear that the discovery process, technology and personnel are under increasing scrutiny. Plaintiff's counsel are reading the same opinions from Judge John Facciola (United States v. O'Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14 (D.D.C. 2008)) and the 9th Circuit (Quon v. Arch Wireless). Many will interpret them as a signal to initiate Daubert style hearings to force corporations to defend their search engines, communication systems and the discovery effort in response to discovery demands. (read more)

Deduplication is currently one of the hottest topics in data protection but it takes more than one form. The CommVault® Simpana® software suite implements deduplication as a Single Instance Store (SIS). In this iteration, SIS deduplicates archived and backed up files at the file level and then only stores one occurrence of the file. In part 2 of this interview series with CommVault Systems' Senior Director of Information Access and Management, Simon Taylor, elaborates on how Simpana leverages SIS for information search and data mobility as well as how this approach complements block-based deduplication approaches found on certain disk-based storage solutions. (read more)

The 9th Circuit of Appeals reversed a district court ruling, Quon v. Arch Wireless, in which a wireless text messaging service turned over message transcripts to their customer, the Ontario Police Department, during an investigation on an officer's excessive use of the department provided pager. The fact pattern has some twists and turns, but buried within the opinion are issues that are worth exploring for every corporation contemplating out-sourcing their communications via SaaS or other external provider. (read more)

There is a growing perception among those who are intimately involved with information management that the discipline of information management is changing. The fact that it is changing comes as no surprise to anyone as everyone knows that a change has to occur. The question is, "Is this just an evolutionary change or is a paradigm shift in information management about to occur?" (read more)

Keywords are easy to understand and even easier to misuse. Beyond the science of 'precision and recall' there needs to be process, communication and metrics to reach the standard of reasonable due diligence, this 'comfort level' that Judge Grimm cites. The process needs to identify the known exceptions to your chosen technology. Have you asked or tested for the ability to search across different formats of email, files, databases, images, voice, video and languages? Do you even know the composition of your ESI collection and how that will affect any searches? (read more)

All of this does not mean that it is impossible to conduct a reasonable, defensible search, preservation or collection. Instead it points out the need to understand your environment and to document the efforts made to test and analyze the capabilities and exceptions of potential eDiscovery technology before putting them to use. With more innovative CIO's looking to implement enterprise search and analytics, it is critical that the legal department collaborates on the system requirements and testing process. (read more)

So when you are shopping for a solution to your growing messaging environment, remember to make sure that the solution you pick will not turn into the retention nightmare down the road. Ask the hard questions about retention management, migration strategies and storage formats. (read more)

Back in the dark old days of purely paper productions, which is only 8-10 years ago, no one wanted to open the Pandora's box and talk about email and other ESI. Instead, they asked the custodians to simply print out everything relevant and deliver it with the rest of the 'records'. Imagine the inefficiency of a senior vice president staying late to print a year's worth of manually selected email. Then the vendor made three or more copies for internal, external and expert review. The story gets worse from there, but that is supposed to be old news. I remember a client telling me, "We don't ask about email and they don't ask about email. Get it?" (read more)

A conceptual engine essentially lets the ESI talk for itself. Rather than a person creating a search from their preconceptions of what criteria will retrieve all items related to a given request, the systems analyze and present the items back as folders, dot clusters and other visual diagrams to help the user make sense of the complex relationships. All of this sounds like just what the attorney asked for. "Give me everything relating to this deal." (read more)

"CommVault® Systems has transformed from a backup company into an information management company." That statement by Marcus Muller, CommVault's Intellectual Property Counsel, encapsulates how CommVault Systems currently views itself as a company. Muller justifies his position by pointing to CommVault's innovative efforts around its Simpana® Software suite and how these have resulted in patents that helped CommVault transform itself into an information management company while giving it an edge up on its competition going forward. (read more)

Knowing that one can search digitized conversations, the next question is can users effectively search everything within the enterprise system from unified federated search? There is little doubt that the archiving systems are aggressively pursuing acquisitions, partnerships and development to enable ingestion and indexing of every conceivable data stream. All of them started with email back in the late 1990's. For example, Symantec doesn't have audio, but jumped ahead with early products to handle IM, file shares, Sharepoint through merger and acquisition. (read more)

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 threshold and cut lose the capitol budget to reign in bloated Exchange environments and service provider profits. But selecting the right solution for a large public company or governmental agency is an entirely different process from the immediate needs of the SMB market and smaller state or county entities. Recent changes in the dominant archive platforms seem to acknowledge this reality as some of them raise the minimum target sale and focus their channel on large enterprise sales. (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)

The evolving nature of today's corporate legal landscape is creating sets of problems that companies never envisioned when they put data protection software in place years ago. Electronic data discoveries, ad hoc searches, legal holds and establishing chains of custody are now all part of today's corporate requirements that are pushing the capabilities of their existing data protection software to the limit. Those companies using CommVault Systems' Simpana® Software Suite are better positioned than most to address these needs. (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)

Carl Frappaolo, AIIM Vice President, Market Intelligence says "Unstructured information drives numerous business processes..." The logical option here would be to deploy a business process management suite (BPMS) of tools. Step one is to identify what departments, project groups and individuals are involved in the business processes. Step two; identify the information that results from those individuals, groups and departments. Step three, once the business process is mapped to the information you simply associate it with a retention management product and policies. (read more)

Randy: I hope the first thing that customers will appreciate is that CommVault® Systems and Microsoft are speaking the same language, one that enhances and embraces the Microsoft operating system and applications. After that, I hope they realize our development teams are in close communication which is a key reason why CommVault is so often a launch partner for major Microsoft releases - like Windows 2000, Server 2003, Server 2008, 64-bit computing, Exchange 2000, 2003 and Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint, and so forth. We get involved with their early adopters and often it is their early adopters who give us suggestions for our solutions. (read more)

Randy: Microsoft introduced and endorsed the CommVault/Sun partnership for the key reasons they chose to partner with CommVault back in 1999. CommVault utilizes Windows and other Microsoft technologies as the platform to provide heterogeneous data management with key granular management of Exchange and SharePoint. CommVault learned many years ago how critical it was to offer granularity for the recovery and management of items like Exchange messages, SharePoint items and Active Directory objects/attributes. We used that early granular management foundation as a base for enabling today's content specific search capability. (read more)

The list of enterprise data management software that can be sold to work with any type of storage hardware is very short. Yes, Symantec is on the list but many channel organizations report dissatisfaction with their overall relationship with Symantec: it's a reputation that persists regardless of whether or not it is deserved. So while resellers and users may wish they could stay with Symantec, they crave a new choice in data management software that is built around a suite of products rather than a portfolio of point products. In this software void CommVault's Simpana® software suite has emerged as a viable option. (read more)

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA). If Microsoft and Sun were collaborating on a charity picnic this time last year, it would have been a shock. Now these companies are coming together to provide a combined software and hardware solution and... (read more)