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<b><i>Product Review:</b></i> Making the Transition from e-Discovery to Information Management with C2C
The evolution of e-discovery is effective information management. Measuring success in e-discovery is becoming less about the number of documents one can zip through in an hour, and more about how effortlessly corporations can search, retrieve and produce their digital data.
e-Mail is still the number one source of relevant information for litigation, so it's no surprise that it's the starting line for corporations seeking to implement information management policies. One of the more straightforward methods is with an e-mail archiving platform.
According to C2C, a “retention management” company that has been steadily putting more focus on compliance and e-discovery concerns, there are three main reasons why a corporation considers an e-mail archiving platform: 1) performance improvements; 2) legal compliance; and 3) policy enforcement.
The ArchiveOne Platform
ArchiveOne is C2C's flagship product and provides an incredible amount of flexibility for e-mail administrators who desire the ability to granularly manage e-mails files and messages.
The ArchiveOne platform can be used to enforce e-mail policies as well as securely retain messages when necessary. The platform is created in a modular format, which means that other modules from C2C can be added for even more functionality.
Most components of the Archive- One platform are built on top of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) framework, which is a friendly environment for IT professionals. The lawyer decides what e-mails are necessary to monitor from a policy standpoint, and the IT administrator runs the searches in ArchiveOne based on employee names, data ranges, keywords, etc.
Once a search is set up, the IT administrator can create a “Repository,” which can hold a vast set of information collected from multiple mailboxes and other sources. After that, the IT administrator can create a Task to perform a specific action ' for example, all of the messages collected in a Repository can be copied to another location for litigation hold purposes.
The Headaches of PSTs
The ArchiveOne platform can track down PST files like a good hunting dog. ArchiveOne can obviously be pointed directly at the location of a known PST file (e.g., on the Exchange Server), but it can also be let loose on the network to find where employees have squirreled away their own secret PST stashes. C2C calls these “un-coupled” or “un-associated” PST files and they are regularly overlooked.
If it weren't for e-discovery, lawyers would never be bothered about PST files. But PST files are easy for anyone in Outlook to create, and they can contain vast troves of messages, calendar entries, and all sorts of other important, relevant information.
PSTs are easy to find when they reside where they belong. But anyone using Outlook can create their own PST archive file, and this is one way that many employees will “get around” the restrictions imposed on their Inboxes.
ArchiveOne can search every personal computer and network share to find “un-coupled” or stray PST files, and will include them in Repositories. And it will do this “in-place,” without disturbing the PST's locale or metadata.
Web Administration Panel
Typically, once a legal team defined what they needed from Archive- One, it informed the IT team that performed the search. But the legal team would always modify the search, or need something more, which meant the IT team would go back and generate additional data sets. C2C took notice of this perpetual back and forth and built the Web Administration Panel.
The Web Administration Panel can be used by anyone that the administrators provide with login credentials. The interface is proving much more popular with customers and C2C plans to move the entire ArchiveOne system to a Web-based interface.
When you visit the Web Administration Panel through your favorite Web browser, you'll see four tabs at the top: Dashboard, Legal Console, Audit Console and Advanced Discovery. As expected, the Dashboard shows the status of systems and tasks.
The Legal Console Tab
The next tab is the Legal Console, which can be used to search through any existing data archive to locate items. The search box accepts any keyword, while an Advanced Search option lets you search through specific folders or users.
Once search results are returned, you'll see several options for exporting the information. For example, you can “Export All Results to PST,” which means you can batch the e-mails from the search results into a new, separate PST. This is a quick and painless method for creating production sets from archived messages.
The Legal Console also has a Preview pane for viewing the content of any e-mail selected in the search results box.
The Audit Console Tab
C2C defines an “audit event” as a recordable action that took place within the system. This may sound a bit boring, until you realize that it tracks any and all changes made to a policy setting. That information can be extremely helpful when you need to know who changed what and when. All of that information is available from the Audit Console tab.
The Advanced Discovery Tab
The “Advanced Discovery” tab is the main section where C2C intended for customers to perform collection and preservation actions related to e-discovery. The two main tasks in this area are “Early Case Assessment” and “Collection.”
To begin, you'll need to create a “Case” at the top of the page where you define the custodians involved.
Next, the “Early Case Assessment” (ECA) section allows you to run a search on either a live mailbox (e.g., on the Exchange Server) or an existing ArchiveOne repository. C2C allows you to run multiple ECA searches here, but each time the search must go out to the live or archived data.
On one hand, it's a good thing that every search is crawling the latest data. But on the other hand, these searches can be slow, and my conception of ECA should allow you to conduct rapid tests on collected data.
I mentioned my thoughts to the C2C folks, telling them that litigation support professionals usually need a little more speed and flexibility in running searches in an ECA environment.
Once an ECA search is finalized, you can create a “Collection” task. When you give the green light, the ArchiveOne platform goes back out to the data locations and collects the ESI based on the parameters you provided (that were theoretically based on your extensive searches in the ECA phase).
Conclusion
I am very impressed with C2C's ArchiveOne platform because it is so extensible and functional. The company has obviously put a lot of work into the platform over the years and continues to keep IT administrators as their main focus demographic.
That said, I am pleased to see C2C doing more to address the legal and compliance needs of corporations and organizations. As e-discovery continues to evolve into information management, companies like C2C are providing the tools to make the transition easier.
Brett Burney is Principal of Burney Consultants LLC, where he works with law firms and corporations on managing electronic data for litigation matters. He is a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors and a frequent contributor to Law.com. He can be reached at [email protected]. Visit his blog at www.ediscoveryinfo.com.
The evolution of e-discovery is effective information management. Measuring success in e-discovery is becoming less about the number of documents one can zip through in an hour, and more about how effortlessly corporations can search, retrieve and produce their digital data.
e-Mail is still the number one source of relevant information for litigation, so it's no surprise that it's the starting line for corporations seeking to implement information management policies. One of the more straightforward methods is with an e-mail archiving platform.
According to C2C, a “retention management” company that has been steadily putting more focus on compliance and e-discovery concerns, there are three main reasons why a corporation considers an e-mail archiving platform: 1) performance improvements; 2) legal compliance; and 3) policy enforcement.
The ArchiveOne Platform
ArchiveOne is C2C's flagship product and provides an incredible amount of flexibility for e-mail administrators who desire the ability to granularly manage e-mails files and messages.
The ArchiveOne platform can be used to enforce e-mail policies as well as securely retain messages when necessary. The platform is created in a modular format, which means that other modules from C2C can be added for even more functionality.
Most components of the Archive- One platform are built on top of the
Once a search is set up, the IT administrator can create a “Repository,” which can hold a vast set of information collected from multiple mailboxes and other sources. After that, the IT administrator can create a Task to perform a specific action ' for example, all of the messages collected in a Repository can be copied to another location for litigation hold purposes.
The Headaches of PSTs
The ArchiveOne platform can track down PST files like a good hunting dog. ArchiveOne can obviously be pointed directly at the location of a known PST file (e.g., on the Exchange Server), but it can also be let loose on the network to find where employees have squirreled away their own secret PST stashes. C2C calls these “un-coupled” or “un-associated” PST files and they are regularly overlooked.
If it weren't for e-discovery, lawyers would never be bothered about PST files. But PST files are easy for anyone in Outlook to create, and they can contain vast troves of messages, calendar entries, and all sorts of other important, relevant information.
PSTs are easy to find when they reside where they belong. But anyone using Outlook can create their own PST archive file, and this is one way that many employees will “get around” the restrictions imposed on their Inboxes.
ArchiveOne can search every personal computer and network share to find “un-coupled” or stray PST files, and will include them in Repositories. And it will do this “in-place,” without disturbing the PST's locale or metadata.
Web Administration Panel
Typically, once a legal team defined what they needed from Archive- One, it informed the IT team that performed the search. But the legal team would always modify the search, or need something more, which meant the IT team would go back and generate additional data sets. C2C took notice of this perpetual back and forth and built the Web Administration Panel.
The Web Administration Panel can be used by anyone that the administrators provide with login credentials. The interface is proving much more popular with customers and C2C plans to move the entire ArchiveOne system to a Web-based interface.
When you visit the Web Administration Panel through your favorite Web browser, you'll see four tabs at the top: Dashboard, Legal Console, Audit Console and Advanced Discovery. As expected, the Dashboard shows the status of systems and tasks.
The Legal Console Tab
The next tab is the Legal Console, which can be used to search through any existing data archive to locate items. The search box accepts any keyword, while an Advanced Search option lets you search through specific folders or users.
Once search results are returned, you'll see several options for exporting the information. For example, you can “Export All Results to PST,” which means you can batch the e-mails from the search results into a new, separate PST. This is a quick and painless method for creating production sets from archived messages.
The Legal Console also has a Preview pane for viewing the content of any e-mail selected in the search results box.
The Audit Console Tab
C2C defines an “audit event” as a recordable action that took place within the system. This may sound a bit boring, until you realize that it tracks any and all changes made to a policy setting. That information can be extremely helpful when you need to know who changed what and when. All of that information is available from the Audit Console tab.
The Advanced Discovery Tab
The “Advanced Discovery” tab is the main section where C2C intended for customers to perform collection and preservation actions related to e-discovery. The two main tasks in this area are “Early Case Assessment” and “Collection.”
To begin, you'll need to create a “Case” at the top of the page where you define the custodians involved.
Next, the “Early Case Assessment” (ECA) section allows you to run a search on either a live mailbox (e.g., on the Exchange Server) or an existing ArchiveOne repository. C2C allows you to run multiple ECA searches here, but each time the search must go out to the live or archived data.
On one hand, it's a good thing that every search is crawling the latest data. But on the other hand, these searches can be slow, and my conception of ECA should allow you to conduct rapid tests on collected data.
I mentioned my thoughts to the C2C folks, telling them that litigation support professionals usually need a little more speed and flexibility in running searches in an ECA environment.
Once an ECA search is finalized, you can create a “Collection” task. When you give the green light, the ArchiveOne platform goes back out to the data locations and collects the ESI based on the parameters you provided (that were theoretically based on your extensive searches in the ECA phase).
Conclusion
I am very impressed with C2C's ArchiveOne platform because it is so extensible and functional. The company has obviously put a lot of work into the platform over the years and continues to keep IT administrators as their main focus demographic.
That said, I am pleased to see C2C doing more to address the legal and compliance needs of corporations and organizations. As e-discovery continues to evolve into information management, companies like C2C are providing the tools to make the transition easier.
Brett Burney is Principal of Burney Consultants LLC, where he works with law firms and corporations on managing electronic data for litigation matters. He is a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors and a frequent contributor to Law.com. He can be reached at [email protected]. Visit his blog at www.ediscoveryinfo.com.
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