New ediscovery guide for judges

The Federal Judicial Center has released a new pocket guidge for judges when handling ediscovery. Compared to most legal documents, this guide is quite brief, direct, and manageable. It is written in "plain English" rather than legalese so it fulfills a purpose of explaining ediscovery to a much wider audience. Also, this is great insight for litigators and ediscovery vendors, service providers, and practitioners to better understand what the judges are using to approach electronic discovery.


Title:
Managing discovery of electronic information : a pocket guide for judges / Barbara J. Rothstein, Ronald J. Hedges, and Elizabeth C. Wiggins

http://antpac.uci.edu/record=b3491038

Rove's emails missing

Without getting too political, what is the actual likeliness of this story.

Click here for article

It is hard to imagine that these emails are really missing, but if they are, what is going on at the White House?

Osterman Research Blog

I have always been a fan of the products put out by Michael Osterman and his crew of researchers. They focus heavily on the messaging industry and I discovered today that they have started a blog. Welcome Michael and team!

Click the link in the sidebar to see the blog.

On research in general, if someone happens to desire to share some research or post something relevant on the Messaging Mogul blog, I would be more than happy to read it, discuss it, and post it at your request and approval.

It seems this industry jumped up pretty quickly and is expanding rapidly. At first archiving was available in the same form for any company or industry that wanted it. Now with Compliance, Ediscovery, Supervision, Security, and Storage Management all major factors in an archiving discussion, some companies have more of a need for one piece than another. I would imagine that messaging companies will begin to narrow their focus to a particular industry or size of company and will need to focus their solution more intensely. Any thoughts? We'll see.

FRCP article

Retention still critical

Thursday, March 29, 2007

By Mark Fellows mfellows@mbusinessreview.com

Automated backup systems for information technology shouldn't be relied on for archiving purposes, a consultant warns, as new court discovery rules are applied to electronic documents.

Rules now in effect make it more important for businesses to provide for electronic-information archiving and search capabilities before being forced to by a lawsuit, lawyers say.

Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure make the availability of electronic records -- transactions, communications, even voice mail -- among the first issues to be discussed in any federal lawsuit. Parties have between 60 and 90 days to confer on a discovery plan after a complaint is filed.

Click here to read full article

More Messaging Management Moguls

Thanks to Roger Matus of Death by Email for reaching out and for the shoutout today.

I am looking forward to hearing more from writers/bloggers/podcasters etc. in the messaging space. This space is getting more and more attention in organization since the email and instant message have become so vital in legal proceedings and compliance violations.

This is a major reason why I enjoyed learning about Roger's company, Inboxer. They are in the search, supervision, and surveillance space in the messaging industry which I think is the prime place to be these days. Of course employees need to be able to search their old emails for information in a way that is fast and efficient, but lawyers and compliance officers are under a big green dollar-sign shaped gun that comes in the form of a regulatory or litigation request and not only do they need a quick response tool, they need the promise that the right information is in their response and the wrong information is out; that they are not providing more information than they must; and that they can explain the relevance of what they do provide.

Any time spent developing products in this space is time well spent in my mind, with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure taking effect, everyone will need to manage their message stores better and everyone will need these products, not just big banks and public multinationals, everyone.

Good Email Archiving Article in WSJ

The Wall Street Journal published an article on email archiving in Monday's edition. Nothing groundbreaking, just a quick story about how an inability to produce emails in a timely fashion has burned companies in the past.

The new piece here is the fact that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure took effect at the end of last year which applies strict guidelines to storing and producing all electronic data that is created within an organization. This is a firm encouragement for not just heavily regulated and public companies to manage their information better, but for all companies to archive communications and be able to produce them in the event of a litigation request.

You need a WSJ subscription to read the full text of this article online, if you can't access it, please let me know and I can assist.

Letter of the Law
Email is becoming a big factor in court cases -- so companies are looking for better ways to sort through it when trouble hits
By MICHAEL TOTTY

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117434583190242025.html

Virtual Tape Libraries/Disk to Disk Backup???

I have recently been introduced to new technology that has compression rates on storage that is enough to cause refridgerator toting storage vendors to quiver in their boots. This technology, which is delivered by the likes of Data Domain and others claims to take take time, money, stress, and annoyance out of tape-based backup and can reduce the amount of disk storage required up to 300 times or something like that...

So, my question, is this the future? Is this really happening? Are storage vendors really threatened by this technology?

I would assume that the EMC's of the world have a response; or a product of their own; or an M&A team working on something as I type this message.

Educate me...

ZipLip is Number 1, this is why.

Email archiving is a rapidly growing industry. It is not just for the wealthy companies that are under scrutiny by the SEC, NASD, DoJ, Attourney General, etc. Now more than ever investors, employees, stockholders, hedge funds, private equity companies, competitors, and the general public are analyzing companies to the core to protect their interests. Archiving companies need to be flexible.

They need to be omni-agnostic; this means that they cannot specialize on servers; storage; email platform; existing applications, industry, or philosophy. By philosophy I mean whether you want something held in house, hosted, or as an appliance that can be rolled and and turn-key operated.

ZipLip is the only archiving vendor that I have seen that does this, hands down. If I am wrong, let me know, because if someone else is out there and can compete with ZipLip in this market, you need to fire your marketing person and get someone else who knows what they are doing.

The Bell Curve--Where do you see yourself?

NU list defined

The burning question: What is the NU list, how do you get on it and how do you move up? Well, picture your standard bell curve, it represents the distribution of parties as measured by some qualitative or quantitative value. Our company takes a more subjective stance in the field of new technologies in the messaging, security, compliance, storage management, and esdiscovery markets and looks at who is leading in innovation, marketing, management, flexibility, relevance etc.

We take these factors into account and place companies along this curve, to the extreme left are companies whose technology just has not found its stride in the marketplace, there is not a large enough need, management is struggling to find direction, the story is not defined and a myriad other reasons why they are in the early stages of "hotness" Then there is the incline of the bell, the hottest zone to be in. These are the technologies that are out there seeing the big names in the industry, making meetings, getting their products in for evaluation, closing deals, supporting their partners, training new people on their technology, wowing conference attendees. These are the technologies we ride with. We help bring new technologies to the mainstream community.

Then either through merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, or shear success, companies reach the top of the bell curve, and then begin to trickle into the downward slope. Unfortunately this is when we need to say "adieu." For whatever reason, it does not work out. The market becomes saturated, management loses the start-up mentality, the partner community is flooded, Costco starts selling the product...whatever happens, it happens, we wish you the best, it was a great ride but this is business and there are 20 other technologies that are on the upswing.

So that is how we define the list, or that is my take on it at least. We love being in this position, we maintain contacts with the big corporations, the forward thinking corporations, the progressives, and we bring them dependable technologies that are doing new things but work and are trustworthy and won't cut bait at the first sign on trouble.

We have fun, we are motivated by new ideas, new technology, and most of all, new leads...

Informative article about File Virtualization

This article is a good overview of file virtualization. I have been working with Acopia who is mentioned and has a great product.



http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/12/07FEvirtualstor_1.html



www.acopia.com

Technologies I cover

Monitoring and Surveillance
File Virtualization
Email Policy Management
Email Archiving and Journaling
WORM Storage
Content Filtering for IM, Web, Email
BackFile Conversion
Data Life Cycle Management
Business Continuity/D R
Email Migration
Messaging Hierarchical Storage Mgmt
File, & Record Archiving
Integrated Fax Archiving
Anti Spam
Anti Virus
Blackberry Management and Security
Email Back-up and Restore
Fax Servers
Server Consolidation
Instant Messaging Management
Anything else I find relevant...

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