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Sometimes the same story can play out over and over again, albeit with slightly different twists. As a Forrester Research analyst in 2005, I co-authored a report titled “The Enterprise Content Management Dilemma: Point Solution Or Suite.” The premise was simple: a content management platform that could manage all information for all purposes (persuasive for marketing and sales, knowledge for employee use, records retention for compliance and risk) made more sense in theory than multiple applications to manage all that information.

My definition of Dark Data differs from Wikipedia:“Data relevant to a discovery request that is either never disclosed or is produced without contextual information that could affect the interpretation of that data.” My first interview on cloud sources as discovery targets turned up surprising frustration from the savvy eDiscovery Counsel for a national plaintiffs firm. I expected to hear about immature collection capabilities and defendant’s who struggled to preserve or collect from Office 365, SalesForce or other cloud systems. I did not expect that requesting parties might be completely in the dark about where a production comes from or how it was collected. eDJ’s consultants have had too many recent engagements supporting the evaluation or migration of email and files to the cloud to doubt the trend. Microsoft has been touting the rapid adoption of Office 365 with corporate and public sector verticals. Many corporations seem to have moved critical ESI to the cloud without a clear plan to meet eDiscovery and Information Governance requirements.

Indications are that eDiscovery solution purchases are about to become more strategic in nature. A decade ago, it was not uncommon to see non-competitive bids for eDiscovery business because so many purchases were reactive and made under intense time pressure. In the past several months, however, the inquiries from clients have become more intelligent and more specific – a sure sign that folks are getting ready to make more strategic investments in software and services.

Sometimes the same story can play out over and over again, albeit with slightly different twists. As a Forrester Research analyst in 2005, I co-authored a report titled “The Enterprise Content Management Dilemma: Point Solution Or Suite.” The premise was simple: a content management platform that could manage all information for all purposes (persuasive for marketing and sales, knowledge for employee use, records retention for compliance and risk) made more sense in theory than multiple applications to manage all that information.

The EDRM Midyear Meeting press release included the usual project updates and an important announcement regarding George Socha and Tom Gelbmann passing the leadership baton to convert EDRM into a true non-profit standards organization. This transformation raises many questions about the organization’s goals and has some analysts challenging the use (or misuse) of the seven year old lifecycle model by product marketing and management teams. First let’s take a look at these titles, “Is the EDRM a Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of None?” and “Abandoning the EDRM assembly line: a legal-regulatory technology market ripe for change.” While these rather evocative titles could lead you to believe that the EDRM is to blame for software companies that have built ‘Frankenstacks’, products that attempt to support too many divergent business tasks. I am not exactly sure what specific products were being lumped into this category. Most providers chasing the ‘eDiscovery Platform’ market have added legal hold notification, project workflows and some matter management modules to either collection or review foundations, but these are all supporting related tasks.

Indications are that eDiscovery solution purchases are about to become more strategic in nature. A decade ago, it was not uncommon to see non-competitive bids for eDiscovery business because so many purchases were reactive and made under intense time pressure. In the past several months, however, the inquiries from clients have become more intelligent and more specific – a sure sign that folks are getting ready to make more strategic investments in software and services.

My definition of Dark Data differs from Wikipedia:“Data relevant to a discovery request that is either never disclosed or is produced without contextual information that could affect the interpretation of that data.” My first interview on cloud sources as discovery targets turned up surprising frustration from the savvy eDiscovery Counsel for a national plaintiffs firm. I expected to hear about immature collection capabilities and defendant’s who struggled to preserve or collect from Office 365, SalesForce or other cloud systems. I did not expect that requesting parties might be completely in the dark about where a production comes from or how it was collected. eDJ’s consultants have had too many recent engagements supporting the evaluation or migration of email and files to the cloud to doubt the trend. Microsoft has been touting the rapid adoption of Office 365 with corporate and public sector verticals. Many corporations seem to have moved critical ESI to the cloud without a clear plan to meet eDiscovery and Information Governance requirements.

My regular readers know that I have spent a lot of time evaluating Microsoft’s initial discovery tools for SharePoint and Exchange. With so many of our clients contemplating enterprise wide migrations of unstructured data to on-premise or Office 365 SharePoint, I have been scrambling to keep up with all of the eDiscovery offerings that have built connectors to support business requirements such as retention categorization, legal holds, investigations, collections and even review on in-place data. Up to this point, our knowledge of the new SharePoint eDiscovery Center has been based on our briefings, demonstrations and meetings with the Microsoft (MSFT) team and client POC environments. eDJ uses Office 365 for our email and SharePoint sites, including our development cycles tracking goals, requirements and bugs. Since we upgraded our SharePoint sites to the 2013 infrastructure, I decided to upload my validation test data sets and some known test data to a secured email mailbox and to a SharePoint document folder to run some initial hands on tests. The MSFT product management team had assured me that there were major upgrades to the 2013 FAST index that addressed many of the search issues that I found in my Exchange 2010 testing. I took an attitude of ‘believe it when I see it’ in those early briefings and was pleasantly surprised with my initial tests of known file types and search terms when compared to dtSearch, X1 and Symantec’s Enterprise Vault/Discovery Accelerator. That’s right, the 2013 FAST search may be good enough for selective preservation or collection.

In a recent eDJ Reviewed briefing session, Geoff Bourgeois (CTO of Acaveo) highlighted the Smart Information Server’s rapid installation by pointing out that all the only preparatory requirement was a single service account with essentially “Superuser” access rights to every data source that you want to see, search or collect from. Having sat through hundreds of product demos, I know that it takes nerve to do a cold installation, configuration, search and collection in a one hour demo on a live remote environment. It occurred to me that every enterprise discovery collection system on the market assumed that the corporate IT group would give Legal/Compliance full access rights. I have observed increasing tension between IT, Security, Legal and other stakeholders over these ‘keys to the data kingdom’. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was the first big access rights wake-up call to IT. Every new article on massive data breaches (example Target stores) drives IT/Security to slam the gates of the corporate castle and scream “None shall pass!”

2014 is shaping up to be a good year for Microsoft when it comes to SharePoint migrations and/or Office 365 adoption. Consulting client inquires have had me writing, speaking and researching about the new Microsoft eDiscovery Center and the overall challenges/benefits of launching corporate ESI to the cloud. But enterprise migrations require many months of planning, user education and testing prior to moving email and files. I am seeing conservative enterprise clients estimating 12-18 months as a realistic project lifecycle when assessing upgrades and migrations. That creates a need for interim tools to perform eDiscovery collections from on-premise SharePoint and/or cloud SharePoint in Office 365 environment. Since some IT groups have a tendency to kick off pilot projects without consulting legal or compliance, I can see many companies having a short-term need for a collection tool where they do not want to commit to a full ‘eDiscovery platform’. Thus the inspiration to update the SharePoint Collection category in the eDJ Matrix and add a new category just for Office 365 Collection.