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Nearly two years ago I wrote a blog on managing the balancing act between eDiscovery and business requirements. The blog identified the differing perspectives of key stakeholders in supporting corporate business goals while maintaining compliance with legal hold and discovery response activities, records and information management compliance, and IT goals and objectives. It also examined three relevant topic areas for corporations where differing perspectives were ripe for analysis. Interestingly, the challenges haven’t changed. Nor have the relevant topics used for example. However, advances in technology have altered the landscape.

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!”

At its most basic level, this business model shift is really a subtle one away from the broken traditional analyst model to one of market-makers that cover a select number of vendor companies (as opposed to trying to cover all 500+ providers) and work on the ground with consulting clients. The hope is that this will actually be a more beneficial model in that the research-on-demand element will lead to producing more timely, relevant reports that help our clients do their jobs.

Recommind hit the market hard in 2011 as one of the earliest predictive coding (PC) offerings. They garnered a bit of market backlash for their high profile announcement to broadly enforce their PC patent but seemed to shift their focus to Information Governance corporate sales in 2012. Recommind’s latest round of funding for $15 million in September of last year seems to have coincided with a return to eDiscovery along with a quiet turnover of key management. Indeed, Axcelerate 5 represents an entirely new HTML5 application layer on the CORE platform infrastructure to address adoption complexity and increase usability and accessibility. This makes sense when you learn that the cloud based Axcelerate On-Demand represents the majority of Recommind’s revenue. It feels like Recommind is doubling down on eDiscovery while waiting for the corporate market demand for enterprise analytics and Information Governance to catch up. The overall take-away is that Axcelerate 5 is a ‘new’ review product aimed squarely at customers seeking a hosted review platform with mature linear and PC capabilities.

So you didn’t brave the snow to make the big show this year? Guess what, you were not alone. Someday I will understand why a February conference has to be held in NY. I don’t want you to get the impression that the show was deserted, but it definitely did not hit the projected attendance of 13,000 based on my time on the exhibitor floor and conversations with exhibitors. So traffic was down, the third floor of exhibitors converted to a stage and some empty booth slots at the back of the second floor. On the up side, providers seem to have figured out how to qualify real prospects and route them off the floor to demo suites for serious sales discussions. Indeed, the real action seems to have moved to suites, lounges and other quieter venues. This explains why the Hilton converted so much of our casual meeting zones to private/paid space. For next year, expect to stand through your meeting, leave the hotel or pay for a dedicated space to talk shop. My top impression is that of a widening confidence gap between the market leaders and the mid-tier players who are struggling to adapt their value proposition to an increasingly savvy consumer base.

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.

One of my favorite client’s just put in her notice and that got me thinking about managing legal holds with our increasingly mobile workforce. We all know those key custodians who are the “go to” person when you need to understand the history and critical details on ESI data sources. These ‘system ’ or ‘perpetual’ custodians are named in almost every legal hold. Their departure can have a disproportionate impact on discovery events unless they can properly document and transfer knowledge prior to their departure. It took me a solid month to create the ‘discovery bible’ documenting process and sources when I left my last position as the ‘corporate custodian of record’ back in 2006. We had a contract in place to cover any future calls, affidavits or testimony that was reviewed and approved by Symantec’s legal department. That gave my old team confidence that they could call if stuck or needing confirmation. Not every custodian has that flexibility and many do not depart on friendly terms. So how can you mitigate the potential impact of legal hold custodian departures when you know that they are going to happen?

One of the driving factors in e-discovery behind the spectacular growth in linguistic analytical tools like concept search, document clustering, and PC/TAR is the simple fact that people don’t all speak alike. I sometimes buy a grinder for lunch, while my business partner prefers subs, and a Philadelphia-based client of mine prefers hoagies. We’re all talking about the same kind of sandwich, of course (though there’s some debate over the need for lettuce), but a computer algorithm using key word search won’t necessarily make that connection unless a helpful human being has manually tied these different terms together for it. A good concept or context search engine, however, will recognize that these terms are often discussed in similar circumstances (e.g., lunch, types of cheese); it will serve up these sandwich terms together, not separately.

After a long journey over the last six months, I am now ready to get back in the eDiscovery saddle. Just after Thanksgiving 2013 I went on family medical leave. Coincidentally, eDJ Group also went through a lot of changes during that time. In this blog I will address both.