2005-12-19

Morris, Duane LLP. Unpleasant Discovery. Mondaq. Nov. 30, 2005.

Interesting example of e-discovery case around a discrimination scenario.

Mehta, Nick. E-mail discovery: Steps for getting quick access to data you need. Computerworld. Dec. 13, 2005.

Symantec (ala Veritas ala KVS) perspective on e-discovery ... some good stats.

2005-12-05

Oswald, Ed. Microsoft Simplifies E-mail with 'SNARF'. BetaNews. Dec. 2, 2005.

Interesting new app from Microsoft (in beta) to facilitate e-mail triage. Will give it a try ...

2005-11-03

CNN. Lawmaker: E-mails show Brown 'out of touch' during Katrina - Nov 3, 2005

Once again e-mails come back to haunt ... in this case with respect to FEMA director Michael Brown's response to Hurricane Katrina.

2005-11-02

Leyden, John. MessageLabs nabs Omnipod for IM security. The Register. Nov. 2, 2005.

MessageLabs acquisition of IM provider.

2005-10-27

Allman, Thomas. US Poised for new Disclosure Laws. Legal Week. Oct. 27, 2005.

Legal WeekImportant discussion of Rule 26(b)(2)(B) which brings e-discovery legislation ammendments to the US Supreme court ... targeting an end-of-2006 adoption. Read on ...

AP. Prosecutor, Judge in CIA Leak Probe Meet. ABCNews.com. Oct. 26, 2005.

Interesting coverage of the CIA Leak probe ... last line of the article refers to an e-mail that Rove's attorney 'located' referring to a conversation between Rove & Cooper ... key evidence in the case. E-mail has a way of coming up as evidence ...

2005-10-25

Pariseau, Beth. CA folds in e-mail-archiving startup. SearchStorage.com

CA folds in e-mail-archiving startupImportant acquisition by CA of iLumin recently. Not only does this give them an archival play, but also [more importantly IMO] an e-discovery play. Of course where it goes now that CA has absorbed is left to be seen ...

Howard, Philip. The problem with archiving. IT-Analysis.com.

IT-Analysis.com - The problem with archiving

Bass, Steve. CYA with Business or Corporate E-mail. PC World. Oct. 24, 2005.

Quick tips & tweaks on e-mail compliance ...

2005-10-10

O'Regan, Rob. The Ultimate Bug Fix. June 1, 2005. CMO Magazine

Interesting mention buried in here about the "Book of E12" which sounds like a 55-page contract between dev & marketing on the Exchange team at Microsoft.

2005-10-09

Celluon Project Keyboard & Fujitsu Electronic Paper at CEATEC Japan. Makuhari Messe, Tokyo. Oct. 4-8, 2005.

OK I had to blog this ... digressing from my normal theme ... this projection [hologram] keyboard http://www.canesta.com/html/celluon.htm is a really interesting example of thinking outside of the box. Thought I'd blog it. That along with Fujitsu's electronic paper http://www.akibalive.com/archives/000515.html#more are the two most interesting things I noticed in my reading about the Ceatec show in Tokyo this week. Both represent interesting paradyme shifts!

2005-10-06

Socha, George. Socha Consulting e-Discovery Decisions Site. 2003-present.

Socha Consulting LLC > electronic discovery resources > decisionsGreat site. Searchable database of e-discovery decisions.

Redish, Martin. Electronic Discovery and the Litigation Matrix. Duke Law Journal [51 Duke L. J. 561]

Just stumbled across this gem ... some great content in here.

2005-09-14

Atkinson, WIlliam Illsey. They're watching you. Globeandmail.com. Sept. 13, 2005.

A bit off-topic, but a great read.

2005-09-08

Cortazzo, Jamie. Louisiana legal system devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Jurist. Sept. 1, 2005

This raises an interesting perspective on e-discovery, namely disaster recovery & business continuity for e-discovery processes and data themselves. Scary.

2005-08-05

Quest Software - Recovery Manager for Exchange

While I'm on the topic of releases, Quest also released Recovery Manager for Exchange version 3.0 in mid-July ... focused on discovery and recovery of Exchange data. Strong e-discovery featureset in here with unique differentiators including: search within attachments on backup media or in offline stores (only product on market to do this); advanced automation of all tasks in the solution; advanced search operators and options; etc.

Quest Software - Archive Manager for Exchange Release. Aug. 3, 2005

Quest has just released their long-awaited version 2.0 of Archive Manager for Exchange - which adds archival for regulatory compliance purposes to an already-superb operational archive.

Recent management articles: Morgan Stanley's email bounceback. Infoconomy. 2 Jun 2005

Old story but this is a really well-written account ... thought I'd blog this as well. Great read.

Roberto, Mary Kay. E-mail Archiving - A key piece to a compliance strategy. Computer Technology Review. Aug. 2005.

Bit of a vendor article but ok - Mary Kay is an SVP/GM with KVS (now Veritas (now Symantec)).

2005-07-12

McClaran, Robbie. He Took On the Whole Power-Tool Industry (i.e. SawStop). Inc.com. July 2005.

OK this one is off-topic, but as a product manager I'm always interested in stories around bringing innovative and truly valuable solutions into the market ... especially stories that discuss changing an entire market landscape. This one is fascinating. I truly hope that Stephen Gass and his SawStop company are successful in bringing this technology to market mainstream.He Took On the Whole Power-Tool Industry

Fantuzzi, Joe. Document security? Tell me another joke. CNET News.com. July 12, 2005

Great article ... I especially like the last line ... Document security? Tell me another joke | Perspectives | CNET News.com: "Business leaders must realize that while they won't necessarily make the headlines each time a document leaks sensitive data, they could lose a key partner, customer or lawsuit--or worse, their public image"

2005-06-09

Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Days 3-4. Jun 9, 2005.

Well yesterday went by pretty quickly for me ... Charlie Chung and I delivered our MSG 358 session on Managing Exchange Server with Microsoft Operations Manager ... it went well and we had some good questions afterwards. During my part of the session I focused on reporting in the MOM 2005 context and talked about the native Microsoft Exchange 2003 Management Pack reports (focused on Health i.e., performance and availability), the free (to MOM 2005 customers that is) Quest Exchange Reporting Management Pack (focused on advanced Exchange traffic analysis), the still-future Microsoft Service Level Agreement (SLA) Solution Accelerator (focused on scorecarding and trending data collected via MOM 2005 + Microsoft Exchange MP and using System Center Reporting Manager 2005 ... when it ships ... beta for SLA SA is coming later in June) ... and finally I talked about the Dynamic Configuration Manager (DCM) Solution Accelerator (focused on configuration ... which will permit creation of a configuration "manifest" for each of five Exchange Server roles - mailbox, public folder, front-end, internet gateway and bridgehead - and then reporting of servers that are out of compliance ... and will require SMS 2003 + System Center Reporting Manager 2005 ... when it ships ... beta for DCM SA will also be later in June). Bottom line things went well and we scored reasonably high which was good. Today I attended one talk - namely Kieran's discussion of Exchange compliance - was well done as always and the crowd seemed to be pretty interested. Most folks in the Exchange world are new to thinking about compliance, especially the 'holy grail' of legal compliance that Kieran was discussing ... so it was amusing to see folks start to think about some of the points Kieran raised. His comparison of "adverse inference" with pregnancy was great ... and I appreciated his pointing folks to BPI0008 and ISO 15801.

2005-06-07

Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Day 2. Jun 7, 2005.

Some brief comments on today's events. Keynote by Paul Flessner (and MC-ed by Samantha Bee) highlighted SQL Server 2005 and alot of the developer benefits in VS2005 ... Paul announced the launch of SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006 and Visual Studio 2005 will all happen the week of November 7, 2005. Had a nice demo of SQL Server 2005 64-bit edition performance & scale (along with expected but impressively high TPC-C and TPC-H benchmark results), along with some of the fail-over capabilities ... assisted by a $28,000 "BattleBot" that Microsoft contracted ASPSOFT to create to showcase intelligent business logic ... and to use in destroying a network switch with it's ax as part of the demonstration. Also had a demo of RFID technologies using the RFID tags that many of us have been carrying around all week for the demonstration. Finally the usual slew of press releases today ... noteworthy ones follow. Extensions of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services: Xcelsius (enterprise dashboards as part of their Xcelsius XRS solution), Fenestrae (extensions to SWL Server 2005 Reporting Services), and ActiveReports for .NET from Data Dynamics, Ltd. Also manageability press from TNT Software announcing their ELM Enterprise Manager 4.0 offering. That's all for now ...

Reuters. E-mail retention a must after Morgan Stanley case. CNET News.com. May 21, 2005.

E-mail retention a must after Morgan Stanley case | CNET News.com I like the bit about "legal Chernobyl" ...

2005-06-06

Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Day 1. Jun 6, 2005.

Orlando - Tech-Ed officially kicked off this morning with a keynote from Steve Balmer. Some of the interesting tidbits I noted were:- focus on five main IT pains: (a) one identity and password, (b) online presence, (c) network access, (d) synchronization (i.e. "can't my Blackberry do this now" :-) ), (e) self service ... with (f) rights management coming in close sixth- alot of talk around DSI and the "New World of Work" (see microsoft.com)- increasing importance of connecting people & information, self-service, manageability- demo of windows explorer in Longhorn with ability to quickly filter down to items of interest (similar to quickfilter in Excel plus keyword search capability ... and with a zoomable thumbnail browser)- nice demo of heterogeneous manageabilty with MOM 2005 of Solaris system ... Keynote aside, interesting to see who's visible here and who's not. Notably NetIQ isn't all over sponsorship this year ... haven't seen a peep from them yet. Quest obviously is all over this (great!) along with typical HP, CA, Intel, Etc. Also notably Zenprise is making some noise here ... specifically about their 'patent-pending' Correlation, Causation & Correction algorithm. Symantec with the expected attention on anti-virus ... also on their LiveState Client Management Suite, their LiveState Patch Manager, LiveState Recovery Manager 3.0 (not to be confused with Quest's Recovery Manager ... different focus with no Exchange play) and their Symantec Discovery soution focused on client discovery and manageability. And Mimosa is of course continuing to drive their new archival solution. That's all for now ...

2005-05-25

Sengupta, David. QuickReview: Mimosa NearPoint from Mimosa Systems Inc. May 25, 2005.

Mimosa Systems OK I've been thinking of doing "QuickReview"s for quite some time now ... basically where I pick a product and give a really cursory "first impression" review of the product. Trying to provide an overview of strengths and weaknesses that I perceive in a solution. Pretty informal stuff that I don't intend to act as any sort of formal review ... really just ad hoc notes that came to mind ... but hopefully of use.

I've picked Mimosa NearPoint as my first subject :-)

  • Product: Mimosa NearPoint
  • Category: Microsoft Exchange Archival, Microsoft Exchange Recovery, Microsoft Exchange Storage Management
  • Architecture: Click here for vendor architecture diagram
  • Corporate Issues: One of their investors seems to have gotten in some hot water ... interestingly since that story was written in Feb 2005, he has disappeared from the Board of Directors listed on their site.

Highlight 1 - Log Shipping

  • product is built around concept of log shipping, whereby Exchange database transaction logfiles are bifurcated (i.e., take a copy) and the transaction logfile copies are used to maintain a copy of the production Exchange environment
  • customers would need to initially "mirror" (used lightly) their production environment ... once they have a copy in place then the bifurcated transaction logfiles can be replayed against the copy of the production infrastructure

  • Advantages:
  • having a copy of the production Exchange infrastructure provides interesting ability to go back in time, etc. and view historical "snapshots" (again, used lightly ... not to be confused with VSS snapshots, etc.) of a mailbox at any given time. Some of the features they include along these lines are:
  • ... "show mailbox contents as of" feature allows "current", "two weeks ago", "six months ago", etc. with option to display deleted messages
  • ... item- and mailbox- level recoverability for recovery or e-discovery purposes

  • Disadvantages:
  • the amount of data that they will need to persist in medium to large environments would appear to be massive ... which is why I suspect they are targetting small and medium sized enterprises per their website ... I strongly suspect companies with (i) broadly distributed Exchange environment with slow links or (ii) large numbers of Exchange servers would run into some pretty significant limitations or blocking issues if they tried to use Mimosa with it's full complement of features. Not sure but that's my guess. Will be interesting to see where things go ...
  • another disadvantage is that E12 (codename for next version of Exchange Server) has been reported to include "log shipping" technologies ... so assuming reports of mid-2006 ship dates are at least in the right ballpark (i.e., late 2006) that gives Mimosa just over a year to prove their technology and address the challenge of using a different log shipping mechanism in E12. Of course E12 log shipping won't be backward compatible so Mimosa is in the clear for Exchange 2000/2003. Then there's always Symantec's LiveState Recovery and other vendors in the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) market ... and many other CDP players (some working with Exchange, others not having announced any intentions) emerging (i.e., Revivio, TimeSpring, etc.)

Highlight 2 - Outlook Integration

  • they have built the product to expose the archive as a "Mimosa Archive" folder in Outlook... basically they set the folder homepage of this folder to a user-level config screen from which an end user can search, browse or otherwise manage their archive.

  • Advantages:
  • user-friendly and low learning curve

  • Disadvantages:
  • offline becomes an issue (didn't check if they support offline archive use but suspect not) ...
  • also in high availability scenarios, having high archive availability may be a challenge for Mimosa.

Highlight 3 - Security Model

  • they have built the product with a flexible security model (as one would expect) that, as usual, provides for both operational and compliance archival (see the E-mail Compliance Checklist I wrote in April for SearchExchange.com ... here ... for what I mean: ). Some of the features they ship include:
  • ... Self Service functionality enabling Auditor or Delegates to review archive contents within a pre-defined scope
  • ... Ability to decide whether user deletions (i.e., in Outlook) are limited to Production Exchange Servers or are also reflected in the NearPoint archive ... this becomes importance for compliance reasons depending on your corporate retention policies

Other Miscellaneous Configuration & Comments

  • Ability to archive attachments and replace them with a MimosaStub message in the original message (as one would expect ... basic archival feature)
  • Ability to exclude mailboxes or utility mailboxes from archival ... good
  • I liked one part of their Find dialog ... they let you: (i) choose addresses from GAL; (ii) senders to this mailbox; (iii) recipients of this mailbox; and (iv) contacts in this mailbox ... from an e-discovery perspective the last point (iv) is a nice innovation that I haven't seen elsewhere.
  • Obviously as you'd expect they provide the ability to set different retention policies ...

Summary:

  • Pros: Overall I liked the combination of operational and compliance archivability, item-level recoverability and historical point-in-time e-discoverability that Mimosa NearPoint provides.
  • Cons: The massive volumes involved seem to suggest limited value to medium-to-large customers as I discussed earlier. So scalability is my biggest concern.

The entire CDP space will be interesting to watch as they come up with new approaches to old Exchange management pains ...

David

Kovar, Joseph F. Mimosa Exits Stealth Mode With E-mail Archiving Appliance. TechWeb Compliance Pipeline. May 23, 2005.

Compliance Pipeline | Breaking News | Mimosa Exits Stealth Mode With E-mail Archiving Appliance As expected, Mimosa shipped their NearPoint e-mail archival solution earlier this week.

Fried, Ina. Microsoft faces up to SOX challenge. CNN on Yahoo! UK & Ireland News. May 25, 2005.

Microsoft faces up to SOX challenge - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News: "Microsoft faces up to SOX challenge". Will be interesting to see how Microsoft gets this from "goal" to reality in O12. One would assume this to have implications on Outlook 12 and Exchange 12.

2005-05-08

Morgenson, Gretchen. All That Missing E-Mail ... It's Baaack. New York Times. May 8, 2005.

All That Missing E-Mail ... It's Baaack - New York Times Some good tidbits concerning Morgan Stanley ... during recent case againsg Perelman, the judge critiziced Morgan Stanley's document production. As a result they have increased their e-discovery efforts and found numerous e-mails that are evidence for other past cases. Interesting note, during Oct. 2003, Morgan Stanley was fined 10,000/day until it complied with an order that documents be produced.

2005-05-07

Willis, Gerri. 5 Tips: Identity exposed. CNN Money. May. 4, 2005

5 Tips: Identity exposed - May. 4, 2005 Gotta keep an eye on those backup tapes. Getting access to a backup of your Exchange server, for example, is pretty well identical to giving someone access to read all the mailboxes on that server at will. Scary thought.

2005-05-06

Bowers, Toni. Beware the unmanaged risk of e-mail and instant messaging. TechRepublic. May 4, 2005.

Beware the unmanaged risk of e-mail and instant messaging Some good stats in here: - 65% of companies lack e-mail retention policies - 54% of the corporations surveyed conduct e-mail policy training in some shape or form - 20% of U.S. companies have had employee e-mail supoenaed in the course of a lawsuit or regulatory investigation - American Home Products Corp. was fined 3.5 Billion ... e-mail was key evidence - Good quotes from Nancy Flynn (ePolicy Institute): (1) "Employers should look at e-mail and litigation in terms of not IF we someday have our employee e-mail subpoenaed but WHEN we have our employee e-mail subpoenaed", (2) "e-mail and instant messages are a primary source of evidence in court cases. They are the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence". Bottom line: IM & E-mail content need to be managed.

2005-05-04

Todd, Chad. Restore Those Lost E-Mails. Redmondmag.com. May 2005.

Great review about Recovery Manager for Exchange from Quest Software.

U.S., Citing Motive and Evidence, Defends Conviction of a Banker. The New York Times. May 3, 2005.

The U.S., Citing Motive and Evidence, Defends Conviction of a Banker More on the case around Frank Quattrone & Credit Suisse First Boston. Core evidence in this case was a single e-mail. What you write in e-mail can come back to haunt you.

Wright, Kai. Harlem's Toxic Nightmare. GNN. May 3, 2005.

Harlem's Toxic Nightmare Example of an international human rights-related lawsuit in which poisonings in public housing in Harlem are being related to pesticides used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ... once again e-mail evidence is being referenced as part of the story as it unfolds.

Campbell, Ruth. Alpine Open Meetings Charges Dismissed. OA Online News. May 4, 2005.

OA Online News: " While the case was dropped against these two Alpine City Council members, the fact that these two councillors used e-mail to conduct city business (they were accused of circumventing the need for open public forums on specific issues) has undoubtedly affected their careers. Another reminder to think through the implications of how you use e-mail and how laws, regulations and policies can affect your e-mail usage.

[Reuters]. Morgan Stanley Gets Legal Counselor. CNN Money. May. 4, 2005

Shearman&Sterling lawyer David Heleniak joins Morgan Stanley - May. 4, 2005 Good example of a huge company with major pains tied to what is now a US$2.7 billion dollar lawsuit ... all of it is tied to evidence that is on e-mail saved in backups. Managing e-mail data across large volumes of backup media is a huge challenge facing many, many companies like Morgan Stanley.

2005-04-19

Cowper, Jamie. Babies and bathwater. ComputerWeekly.com. April 19, 2005.

Babies and bathwater Good discussion of the risks associated with false negatives in SPAM gateways.

2005-04-06

Lyons, Daniel. IBM In Denial over Lotus Notes. Forbes. April 6, 2005.

Great article on Exchange vs. Notes.

2005-03-23

Moore, Cathleen. Azaleos, Postini ease e-mail management. InfoWorld. March 21, 2005.

Interesting news about Keith McCall's startup ... focused on simple high availability solutions for small/medium customers (up to 2,500 mailboxes) with remote monitoring from their Issaqua, WA datacenter. Keith used to be on the Domino team at Lotus, then went to Microsoft to head up Exchange Server business unit (assisting Gord Mangione and Moshen Al-Goshein during their terms at the helm) ... will be interesting to see where Azaleos ends up going. Huge market segment that has been very difficult to reach.

2005-02-21

[AP]. A List of AIDS Names Is E-Mailed in Error. The New York Times. Feb. 21, 2005.

The New York Times > Health > A List of AIDS Names Is E-Mailed in ErrorYet another example of how the rapid pace with which we all have to process e-mail to keep up can get us in trouble. In this case a staff person for Palm Beach County Health Dept. mistakenly sent a very sensitive attachment to 800+ county health workers.

2005-02-17

Eisenstadt, Marc. Get Real: Eight years of email stats, pass 1. Feb. 11, 2005.

Great read on e-mail overload ... the "skill" of "continuous partial attention" (sic, more of a disorder IMO!) ... and some other good links i.e. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

2005-01-30

Coren, Michael. Digital evidence: Today's fingerprints. CNN. Jan 28, 2005

Well written story on digital evidence in today's crime cases.

2005-01-22

Evers, Joris. Microsoft Reveals Exchange Road Map. InfoWorld. Jan. 21, 2005.

Microsoft made some long-awaited public statements concerning the future roadmap of Microsoft Exchange Server revealing part of their plans for the next major release of Exchange Server, codenamed "Exchange 12".

2005-01-09

Kabbany, Jennifer. Trustee faces lawsuit over e-mails. NCTimes.com. Jan. 6, 2005.

McNish, Jacquie. E-mail used as weapon in court case. The Globe and Mail. Jan. 6, 2005.

Coverage of the CIBC trial in which even PIN-to-PIN Blackberry messages found their way into the courtroom.

2005-01-05

Ganesh, Venkatesh. Storage vendors eye e-mail archiving. Express Computer. Dec. 6, 2004.

Discussion of e-mail archiving and Indian perspective on different vendors incl. NetApp, EMC, Veritas (Symantec), etc.

Gittlen, Sandra. The email privacy quagmire. TechWorld. Jan. 3, 2005.

Good discussion of the issues and costs involved in corporate archival systems ... often archiving massive amounts of personal data in addition to business-related messaging content.