What is the best way to use email archiving systems for e-discovery? Earlier this year, I co-wrote a whitepaper on the topic (sponsored by LiveOffice), and on Wednesday I will present a companion webinar.

The gist is that email archiving can be an incredibly useful tool to manage legal risks and enable more effective discovery of message content. Electronic discovery is growing at an amazing clip, and most cases now include email messages - in fact, email is estimated to be 60% to 70% of all legal discovery in the United States today!

At the same time, companies are challenged with ineffective or un-enforced retention and litigation hold policies and rampant “underground archiving” of messages in offline PST files. And to make matters worse, the 2006 revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure drastically shortened the amount of time companies have to describe and produce electronic records! It’s simply impossible to begin recovering messages from backup tapes in response to legal requests - the only way forward is a proactive strategy based on email archiving.

If this piques your interest, grab a copy of that whitepaper, join me on Wednesday for the webinar, and check out some of my other email-related content. I’ll also be speaking on the topic at Storage Decisions in San Francisco, and would be happy to respond to your emailed questions any time!

Another Storage Decisions has come and gone, and 2008’s New York show did not disappoint. TechTarget always recruits an excellent set of conferencegoers, and not even the Wall Street crisis could dampen attendance. Even Spike Lee, Richard Gere, Dian Lane, Keira Knightley, John McCain, and Sarah Palin made appearances at this year’s show! (No, seriously, they were really there!)

Although my email archiving session always attracts a smaller crowd, they are all a dedicated bunch. One pertinent suggestion from an attendee was to ingest PST files into a special separate archive in order to ensure that messages recovered from it are treated with the proper skepticism. Questions after the session focused on the trick of engaging legal and business people in the decisions around email policy, truly a challenge. I suggested that an on-site mini-seminar for the relevant folks might help to break the logjam and illustrate the issues, something that I would be happy to arrange!

My storage virtualization session was once again placed in the main room, and a much larger group attended it. I was interested to hear just how great the impact of VMware’s VDC-OS had been. In just a week, a dozen or more folks in the audience had heard, comprehended, and strategized about the concept. It’s really that big! Others were very interested in the topic of green metrics for data center usage. How does one monitor and report the real “green” savings (power, carbon, cooling, space) for a virtualized environment? Although storage greenness is debatable, the savings from a virtualized server environment are real, and these often bundle in some of the storage numbers, too.

These topics are top of mind to me as well, and I will continue to investigate (and speculate) about them in the coming year. If you missed the show (or the handouts), I will be posting them here soon! Get my email address or head to LinkedIn by clicking the links in the sidebar (at top left).

Watch this space, and consider coming to my virtualization seminar in Charlotte on October 21 or to the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco, held November 17 to 19.

I’ve been running OS 2.0 on my (first-generation) iPhone for a week and a half now, and as I mentioned before, Exchange ActiveSync push email, calendaring, and contacts was one of the main things Iwas looking for when I upgraded.  That article on setting up ActiveSync has since become my top blog post by far, pulling in literally thousands of hits per day, so I must not be alone in wanting this functionality.

But it turns out that the green grass of iPhone/Exchange integration has a tint of brown.  Folks have experienced issues getting the service set up, and it guzzles battery juice like a toddler at a lemonade stand.  Read on for my notes and suggestions… Continue Reading »

One of the key questions asked of me in my current position at Contoural is this one: How long should we (the client company)  save our email messages?  Not surprisingly, I encounter a wide variety of answers to this question - Legal and IT usually wants a short retention time, while end users seem to want to keep everything forever.

The answer to this question can vary greatly based on conditions, but it is always a solvable problem.  Email is a unique application, and is especially interesting when it comes to litigation and e-discovery, so creating a corporate policy for retention, and implementing it, is critical.  The quandry often boils down to a simple question: Is the email system a repository of business records or a temporal system for communication?  You would never implement a policy for retaining cardboard boxes or manilla folders, because you never know whether it contains an important memo (or a MacBook Air!)  But email could be considered the same way - it’s a mechanism not a data type!

Another key point is that IT often feels that it cannot unilaterally implement a retention policy without outside involvement.  This is true, to a point, but IT had better start the discussion, or they’ll be asked to implement an unreasonable (or technologically unfeasible) policy sooner or later.  Strange as it may sound, a policy that reflects the functionality of email archiving systems might be a good place to start, since this is all you can really implement anyway!

This topic is discussed in far more detail in my new whitepaper (sponsored by Symantec), How Long Should Email Be Saved? Download a copy from their web site to see more information about what a retention policy looks like, the impact of various laws and regulations, and how to get a retention project off the ground!