Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2014-03-19 20:00:00Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
The Houston Association of Litigation Support Managers (HALSM) invited me to speak yesterday on a topic of my choice. Discovery on Office 365 has dominated recent inquiries and engagements for the eDJ team, so I decided to condense my blogs, research, testing and accumulated Office 365 information into an hour presentation. We almost made that 60 minute mark by moving at full speed, but I was happy to detour for all the great questions. Every week brings a new twist as corporations are enticed to migrate their users and ESI to the Cloud based on the potential savings in cost, overhead and infrastructure. The topic definitely resonated with the HALSM membership based on the high attendance, good questions and willingness to run a bit over the normal lunch hour. This material will eventually end up in one or more research reports, but I thought that I would share a couple of the better discussion points.
Surprisingly high level of poll respondents have already used the MS eDiscovery Center
When you consider that SharePoint 2013 and the eDiscovery Center template was not available until 2/28/2013, a 32% rate of adoption/usage in the first year is impressive.
We had to manually recreate our SharePoint sites after a failed BPOS deployment, will Office 365 have a formal ‘roll back’ process?
My response, “Can you imagine any motivation for Microsoft to make it easier to migrate away from Office 365?” Microsoft and every other data platform that I know of have always relied on third party tools and service providers to cover this contingency. Enterprise migration tools are becoming their own market segment as corporate data assets become increasingly mobile and the pace of data transformation increases.
That being said, poll respondents ranked ‘Repository Trap’ as the third highest concern when considering adoption of cloud services; right behind Data Privacy and Data Security.
Are there any differences between email from the eDiscovery Center and local email?
I have not yet tested the 2013 eDiscovery Center exports for metadata integrity and deduplication against versions in PST or MSG form. There were no major issues found in my testing of the Exchange 2010 eDiscovery folder collections, but those used ExMerge or other tools to build the PSTs. I will update you when I have either run the test or someone credible shares their results.
Will we be able to journal our users for compliance and holds in Office 365?
There are two answers to this question. First, Office 365 can be configured to journal (100% email capture) your users. Second, you cannot STORE that email in Office 365. So you will have to direct that stream of envelope email (captures BCC info) to a local Exchange server or a third party cloud archive to store, search and manage that email. This means that you will have TWO repositories and may have two separate hold search systems. The eDiscovery Center from Office 365 cannot run searches across local Exchange/SharePoint systems at this point.
I hope that you have enjoyed the insight into our discussion and look forward to continuing my deep dive into this data source. Thanks to Vinson & Elkins for hosting the luncheon and the speaker schwag.
Greg Buckles can be reached at Greg@eDJGroupInc for offline comment, questions or consulting. His active research topics include mobile device discovery, the discovery impact of the cloud, Microsoft’s 2013 eDiscovery Center and multi-matter discovery. Recent consulting engagements include managing preservation during enterprise migrations, legacy tape eliminations, retention enablement and many more.
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