May 2008 Archives

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)

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)