E-discovery Rules Send Message on Archiving
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New federal e-discovery rules that took effect Dec. 1 are prompting some users to install e-mail archiving software or other tools that can make it easier to search through message directories.
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More than a year after revised e-discovery rules took effect, IT managers are still struggling to understand them and make sure their companies comply with them.
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By Avrum D. Lank, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  Sep. 17--If you hear from the Internal Revenue Service, it is prudent to respond -- unless, that is, the first contact is by e-mail.
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An enhanced multi-threaded syslogd, supporting reliable syslog over TCP and RFC 3195, writing to MySQL databases, fully configurable output formats (with great timestamps), ability to filter on anything, and on-the-wire message compression.   Hi all,  Rsyslog 3.11.2 has just been released. Now it has the ability to convert text files into syslog. This is done by the imfile plugin, which monitors text files. A new libdbi-based output plugin has been written. This adds six additional databases (including Firebird and Oracle) to the supported database set. Also contains small bug fixes. Version 3.11.2 is a recommended release for all version 3 users.  Doc for new Modules:    http://www.rsyslog.com/doc-omlibdbi.html    http://www.rsyslog.com/doc-imfile.html  Changelog:    http://www.rsyslog.com/Article175.phtml  Download:    http://www.rsyslog.com/Downloads-req-getit-lid-79.phtml  I hope this release is useful. As always, feedback is appreciated.  Best regards, Rainer Gerhards
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Some people have started using registered e-mail systems to prove that specific documents were sent or received.
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(Source: MessageLabs) Email has become the lifeblood of modern business, with more than three quarters of an organization's business-critical data stored there. In this white paper, youll learn more about the business challenges created by email archives and PST files, and how the MessageLabs Email Archiving Service can help reduce the associated risks.
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For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.
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(InfoWorld) - Six months afterÂ new federal e-discovery rulesÂ took effect in the U.S., some businesses are still unclear on what they have to do to comply. Under the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP), which took effect Dec. 1, 2006, businesses need to have policies in place on how they will produce electronic documents they holdÂ in the event of a federal court lawsuit. But an analyst with the research firm Gartner says it may take "many more years" for companies to come fully into compliance. "Some of them are lured into a kind of false sense of security," said John Bace, senior vice president of research at Gartner. "They think, 'We have only had to do e-discovery one or two times in the last 10 years so I don't know if we need to go through all of this rigamarole.'' Large enterprises usually have systems in place because they get sued a lot, said Bace. While some firms are diligently implementing changes, others aren't paying enough attention to these issues. Xiotech, a vendor of file management technology, said that in a survey of 166 businesses conducted in March and April, only 39 percent said they had a system in place for document "holds," a demand that they protect important information from being deleted. Less than 25 percent said they had taken steps to comply with the new FRCP rules. But companies can be hit with an e-discovery order regardless of their size. Forty-seven percent of U.S. companies with 20,000 or more employees, and 56 percent of those with between 1,000 and 4,999 employees, received document discovery orders in 2006, according to Enterprise Strategy Group. When crafting their FRCP policies, companies need to delineate how they store and retrieve electronic documents, including e-mail messages, voicemails, and even instant messages. If hit with a lawsuit requesting e-documents, companies have to meet soon after the filing to present an inventory of what electronic documents they have that may be relevant and say how quickly they can produce them. Burgess & Niple, a civil engineering firm in Columbus, Ohio, is "close" to reorganizing all its digital records, said Fred Mau, the firm's chief technology officer. Mau, who began streamlining the company's data storage long before the new rules took effect, realized he needed a better way to organize e-mail. "There is e-mail squirreled away all over the place, on the file servers, on the drives, on PCs, and if somebody lays a discovery motion on me I've gotta go find all that," he said. As a solution, the company used ZantazÂ software to replace the employee system of saving e-mail in Outlook's PST file format. Even though the Dec. 1 deadline has passed, companies should still take time to organize their systems, said Bob Little, vice president of product marketing at Zantaz, which licenses e-discovery software or offers it as a subscription-based service. The sense of urgency around FRCP reminds Little of the urgency around Sarbanes-Oxley or the Y2K computer glitch. "There was an awful lot of noise being made about 'You need to do something now. This is a revolution.' And the reality is that it's not. It's an evolution of standards and practices that companies should be doing." Zantaz introduced a new software suite Monday tied to new versions of Microsoft enterprise software products, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Portal Server 2007, and Internet Information Server 7.0. As it is, more business lawsuits are filed in state courts than federal, which may explain the lack of urgency, said Gregg Davis, chief information officer for Webcor Builders, a construction company. But state rules are similar to federal rules and some states are specifically adopting the new FRCP rules. Businesses need to include FRCP compliance in their ongoing IT planning, Davis said. "It will take time for this to fully filter down, but IT managers and CIOs should have this in mind." Multiple software companies have begun offering e-discovery software or services, but some focus on different areas, such as e-mail archiving, data protection, or deduplication, said Gartner's Bace. "This is a hot market but it's fragmented." Recommind, for instance, provides e-discovery technology to law firms and the legal departments of enterprises. Recommind introduced a new e-mail discovery product Tuesday. The market will remain unsettled for a while, said Marie-Charlotte Patterson, vice president of market strategy at AXS-One, a records compliance management firm. "No one company addresses all the e-discovery requirements from A to Z, so companies may be working with more than one vendor," said Patterson. Â
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As part of its National Digital Library Program, the Library of Congress is collecting and preserving content created by bloggers. But it is having to be selective about what it saves.
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(InfoWorld) - Demand for data storage and retrieval products will increase thanks to new rules governing how digital documents are gathered for civil cases in U.S. federal courts. Among other things, the amended Federal Rules for Civil Procedures (FRCP) delineate how enterprises must respond when compelled to produce documents in a lawsuit. They also let judges decide whether a records request puts an undue financial burden on an enterprise. The updated FRCPs take effect in federal courts on Dec. 1, but individual states are in various stages of implementing some or all of the same rules in their own court systems. California, New Hampshire and Maryland are in the process of adopting these so-called "e-discovery" rules; changes took effect in Idaho July 1. New Jersey's new rules went into effect on Friday. The rule changes focus new attention on technology to catalogue, retrieve and restore documents stored on backup tapes or hard drives. These e-discovery rules, on top of data retention requirements under Sarbanes-Oxley for public firms, HIPAA for health-care enterprises and other regulations, should further spur the already robust data storage and retrieval market. The e-mail archiving market -- most of the documents sought in a corporate lawsuit are e-mails -- is expected to grow to US$7.8 billion by 2010, from $796 million by the end of 2006, according to research firm The Radicati Group Inc. Zantaz Inc., a seller of information retention and discovery management software and services, unveiled this week a tape cataloging service. Cataloging backup tapes can help an enterprise comply with one new e-discovery requirement, said Francis Lambert, senior compliance advisor at Zantaz, in Pleasanton, California. It requires that the IT staff of a company being sued meet with the company's lawyers and opposing counsel early in the discovery process after the suit is filed. The IT professionals need to be able to explain where records being sought are located, in what format and how they can be retrieved, said Lambert. This puts a new onus on an enterprise to get a handle on its document system, he said. "It's important that the IT people be able to inform the company and their counsel what's in their system. They need to better arm themselves for their pretrial conference," Lambert said. Better cataloging can save the cost of restoring documents from dozens of tapes if the enterprise is able to identify the one tape that contains the requested documents. New technology has made tape restoration less expensive, said Kris Haworth , the managing director of the Law and Economics Consulting Group, which advises clients on compliance issues. The firm is advising clients being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly backdating stock options. Since some of those cases date to the mid-1990s, a lot of e-mails are on backup tapes, she said. "It used to be $1,000 a tape to restore, but now it's in the hundreds of dollars," Haworth said. Judges have the authority to decide that requested documents are inaccessible because reproducing them would impose an "undue burden" on the company asked to provide the information. But as the cost of data retrieval goes down, "it's going to become very difficult to argue that the data is inaccessible," Haworth said. The new rules could also spur sales of hard disk storage hardware for data protection and retrieval, said Manish Goel, vice president and general manager of data protection and retention at Network Appliance Inc., a Sunnyvale, California-based storage device maker. Seventy to 80 percent of the files stored on enterprise networks are "unstructured data," Goel said, such as Word documents, PDFs (Portable Document Formats), Excel files. Network Appliance introduced software modules Aug. 14 to its Information Server 1200, designed to find that unstructured data, which the company introduced in November 2005.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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To address the business needs of today's regulatory, legal and competitive business environment, firms must consider active archival solutions that ensure that content integrity, accessibility and reliability are maintained. The operating and capital cost savings in management, training and technology to leverage a common active archive solution for multiple content sources can be profound. Learn how you can deploy an active archive approach to the long term retention, preservation, retrieval and disposition of critical business content.
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The growing problem of accessing old file formats is a "ticking time bomb", the National Archives head says.
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Cultural affairs staffer for this city government e-mails the IT director: She needs the ability to post announcements to media Web sites. Which ones? Pretty much all of them.
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Radio and TV show archives have become valuable prizes in the desperate search for new content for Web sites and DVDs.
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(InfoWorld) - E-mail archiving and recovery software has proved itself useful in the case of the American who flew to Europe even though he had tuberculosis (TB). The Fulton County, Georgia, Department of Health and Wellness tried to prevent Andrew Speaker, of Atlanta, from traveling to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon in May because his drug-resistant form of TB could make him contagious to other airline passengers. Speaker has said in media interviews that he had not been told he couldn't fly. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper covering the case filed an open records request with Fulton County Georgia Government to disclose e-mail messages among health officials in which Speaker's case was discussed. The Fulton County case illustrates how e-mail archiving software can facilitate e-discovery, the process by which organizations retrieve internal electronic documents sought in a government investigation, a lawsuit, or other matters. The market for "active e-mail archiving" software grew to $207 million in 2006, based on licensing revenue, a 42.8 percent increase from 2005, according to the research firm Gartner, which forecasts a $1 billion market by 2011. The top two vendors are Symantec, with $110 million in revenue and a 23 percent share, and Zantaz, with $106 million and a 22 percent share, according to IDC. Autonomy, a British software company, announced July 3Â plans to acquire ZantazÂ for $375 million. Fulton County uses Symantec's Enterprise Vault software. "All I basically had to do was say. ... I want any e-mails retrieved for me that involved the name Andrew Speaker," said Rich Diller e-mail administrator for Fulton County. The software retrieved about 200 pages of e-mail correspondence related to Speaker's case. Based on those documents, the Journal-Constitution was able to report in a June 13 story that although health department officials were scrambling to find a legal way to prevent Speaker from getting on a plane, he had already left. The county retrieved the requested e-mail messages in about 90 minutes. Had the software not been available, the search would have been "your proverbial nightmare," said Diller. "It would have been me opening up individual mailboxes and constructing one-off searches on each mailbox and compiling all the data." Fulton County Government has 7,000 e-mail boxes, said Robert Taylor, chief information officer for the county. "We could not do an enterprise search [manually]. It would have taken us weeks or months," Taylor said, adding that the county gets four to five document search requests each week. Drivers for the growth of e-discovery technology are many: Most all business communications today are done electronically; new U.S. Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCPs) require companies to establish a policy on how electronic documents are preserved and organized; and some enterprises have been embarrassed by sloppy lapses in saving electronic files sought in various cases. But awareness of e-mail archiving appears limited. An independent survey commissioned by another vendor, C2C Systems, revealed that only 24 percent of IT professionals surveyed could identify an e-mail archiving product by name and 37 percent felt that using PSTs was sufficient for e-mail archiving. The file name extension .PST is for personal files, including e-mail. But that is not an adequate archiving tool, said Nick Mehta, vice president of product management at Symantec. PSTs (the actual term is personal information store) are hard to search if they are scattered among multiple desktops. Symantec's Enterprise Vault copies all e-mail, voice mail and instant messages into secured storage and classifies them based on rules the enterprise sets for what needs to be saved, Mehta said. The software also deduplicates the data, eliminating multiple copies of the same messages, to more efficiently use storage capacity. Messages can be saved for 90 days, seven years or forever depending on the company's rules. The database is keyword searchable to retrieve files as needed. Smaller players in the market can also do well. "This market is. ... on fire," said Mike Ivanov, senior director of the archiving business at CommVault Systems, whose sales doubled to $10 million in 2006, from 2005. Speaker remains in treatment at a TB hospital in Denver, in which he is quarantined by order of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. News reports last week revealed that his TB was not as contagious as originally diagnosed.
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Using technology acquired from Postini last year, the Mountain View, Calif. search company has begun offering new spam filtering and message archiving options for businesses.