Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2014-08-10 20:00:00Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
In 2012 Microsoft acquired Yammer, one of the top enterprise collaboration platforms. Think of it as business Facebook with document and conversation sharing functionality. Enterprise class Office 365 customers got the first Yammer integration back in November 2013 and Microsoft just extended Yammer to midsized business and education plans. A sad fact of innovation is that businesses can and will adopt new technology well before the corporate caretakers (Legal, Compliance & Security) have the tools to handle the new source. Last year, I spent a lot of time researching discovery of ESI from mobile devices from an enterprise perspective. The primary goal of many mobile discovery strategies is to minimize the unique ESI stored on those devices to make them essentially irrelevant to typical civil litigation. As much as I would love to use that same ‘duplicate source’ exclusion strategy on files uploaded to Yammer, the broad collaboration functions add critical context that will clearly be relevant to some matters if they are allowed to persist for anything beyond a few months. So have your users found Yammer and started using it with IT’s blessing or on their own? If you have opted for the enterprise system with limited administrative functions, have you had to preserve or collect from it?
The current Yammer roadmap has nothing planned that will give discovery teams anything more than the current ‘dump it all’ collection capability. At some point, the sharp eDiscovery product management team at Microsoft will extend the FAST index to cover Yammer content and enable at least search and selective retrieval from the SharePoint eDiscovery Center. Until that day, discovery professionals are scrambling to find providers, tools and workflow that will accommodate Yammer and other cutting edge collaboration platforms. A fast inquiry to all of the software in the eDJ Matrix that lists Office 365 collection capabilities has only turned up one provider with a brand new connector for Yammer, Exterro Fusion Zeta. Several providers have not answered my inquiries yet, so I hope that there are other solutions for selective collection on the market and I will update you when I find them. In the mean time, I have closed my Analytic Adoption surveys and launch a short poll on Collaboration Platform eDiscovery to get a better view into the impact of this new form of ESI repository. Take the poll and get access to the results when they are published.
Greg Buckles can be reached at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com 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.