Microsoft SharePoint has spread like wildfire through organizations of all shapes and sizes.  SharePoint delivers real business benefits by enabling collaboration in efficient ways, providing ways to track versions of documents edited by multiple parties, allowing non-technical business people to apply basic workflow to content-driven processes, and faster access to information (via search and integration with the MS Office suite of apps).

Many laypeople assume that if information is searchable, eDiscovery will be no problem when the time comes.  But as is often the case in life, the devil is in the details.  Because SharePoint allows users to add value to content (e.g. adding workflow tasks), there is the factor of metadata to consider.

We’ve discussed metadata and the challenges it can create in collection in earlier eDiscoveryJournal entries.  This issue will be paramount in SharePoint instances because of the fact that so many organizations use SharePoint and most collection tools are only able to grab SharePoint document libraries (as they are stored on file systems).  It’s only a matter of time before the legal community figures out the value of these other content items.

The solutions for SharePoint eDiscovery are still in the infancy stage (which makes sense when you consider the youth of SharePoint itself).  There are the archiving vendors like Autonomy,AvePoint, CommVault, EMC, IBM, Iron Mountain (Mimosa), and Symantec.

Search and collection vendors such as Digital Reef and StoredIQ also note an ability to do SharePoint collection, and some vendors have specific SharePoint collection tools like AvePoint DocAve eDiscovery and EMC SourceOne-Kazeon eDiscovery SharePoint Manager.  Another example is the SharePoint governance tool Autonomy ControlPoint, which utilizes Automomy’s IDOL search engine to access SharePoint repositories and make the index available in the IDOL federated search view.

With most of these solutions, the collection is focused on the SharePoint document libraries (the documents that users store within a given SharePoint site).  Some of the archiving vendors combine backup and archiving so that the system captures more than just the document libraries.

However, because SharePoint has a “webpage” interface, it has become common practice to ‘snapshot’ page views using applications like Adobe’s Acrobat Pro and to record the exact URL and time taken when citing that presentation as evidence.  This approach allows for reviewers to have the context of the user interface in addition to the actual content of a given document.

Thus, the solutions on the market today are not full SharePoint eDiscovery solutions at all.  They may help with understanding how much SharePoint content might be responsive (based on keyword searches) or with finding a smoking gun early, but they are not capable of “forensic” collection.

The first product I have heard of that does support forensic SharePoint collection is from MicroForensics.  The solution is a point-in-time collection of SharePoint that captures document libraries, metadata, and snapshots of the UI. MicroForensics collects the document libraries and maintains them as native copies, collects all metadata fields including custom metadata along with the snapshots of each page and stores the snapshots in a MHTML file for ease of review.  Note that this is a point-in-time collection in response to a request (so, this is not an approach that would work for backing up or archiving SharePoint).  Because it’s a forensic collection, it satisfies preservation needs and does so in a way that does not impact the production SharePoint environment.  If there are other products that do this, please let us know by commenting on this Journal Entry.

SharePoint and most modern enterprise applications support custom fields created by the users or at the enterprise level.  As a result, collection systems will have to be nimble to adapt to the changing landscape. The discovery team will need to regularly validate and quality check collections against the originals to be defensible.

Informed customers will make sure that the collection tool can get more than just SharePoint document libraries, but all metadata, as well.  Also look for solutions that will not impact the production environment too heavily; you don’t want to bring SharePoint to its knees when it is a valuable business application.

And finally, get legal and IT together on the same page about how to reasonably prove that your SharePoint preservation and collection methodologies and tools are defensible.

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Where are you in your eDiscovery Education?

• Unsure how to best proceed with an eDiscovery strategy?
• Find the wide variety of tools and platforms available throughout the eDiscovery process to be a bewildering mish-mash of “marketing speak” from the vendor community?
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Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions” created in partnership with Barry Murphy and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

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The “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions“ course has four modules and includes a 30-minute live call with Barry to discuss the course or any eDiscovery project you have in play.

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Module 1: Understanding eDiscovery

• Understanding and Defining eDiscovery
• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
• The Electronic Discovery Reference Model

Module 2: The eDiscovery Imperative

• The eDiscovery Imperative
• The Challenge of Managing and Finding Information
• The Immediate Impact of eDiscovery on Organizations
• The State of eDiscovery Today
• eDiscovery Trends to Consider

Module 3: Getting Started on eDiscovery

• Critical Elements of Good eDiscovery Programs
• Aligning Roles and Responsibilities
• Creating Retention Policies
• Near-term vs. Long-term Issues and Challenges

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• Understanding the Solution Landscape
• Benefits Promised by eDiscovery Solutions
• The Truth About eDiscovery Platforms
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Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

Colliding the Cloud and Premise

Iron Mountain is a curious company with a very large installed base from it’s traditional business of storing physical items for “safe, offsite, long-term storage.” Given the nature of most people in businesses as information hoarders, their traditional business has been remarkably robust, even giving the flailing economy.

What many people do not realize is the growing and significant impact of digital content that is “under management” by Iron Mountain. The split-personality of their physical and digital businesses not-withstanding (they reportedly have issues with the sales teams on either side of the virtual fences of the business not proactively selling across departmental or business unit lines), the digital business is booming as well, due in large part to concerns around rapid (and as low-cost as possible) response to eDiscovery issues.

Cloud 1st, Premise 2nd – Reverse of the Norm?

Back in 2007 (see Carl’s coverage of the acquistion of Stratify by Iron Mountain), Iron Mountain made one of it’s first explicit moves to directly address eDiscovery concerns with it’s acquisition of Stratify, a cloud-based offering used to outsource discovery activities with dedicated processes, semantic intelligence, etc..

Intrestingly, even though Iron Mountain’s longest line of business has been in the physical world, the Stratify acquisition jumped the straight past the traditional “legacy world” of on-premise solutions (to an extent) and straight to the cutting edge.

With the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain rounds out the portfolio for eDiscovery (integration and post-acquisition pains not withstanding) by specifically pulling in a solution that focuses on content where it lives in the largest typical buckets – those being email (as much as my fellow 2.0 pundits like to tout that email is dead, I can assure you it is not, and won’t be any time soon), SharePoint (that slow-moving content platform that is raising all boats), and for those still unmanaged files on desktops, file servers, etc., they can tap into the unmanaged areas as well.

The Theory Is…

If you’ll pardon the pun, Iron Mountain’s strategy appears to be (and which I largely agree with) if you can’t move the (content) mountain into active management, bring the mountain into passive management, so that in case of emergency, you stand a chance of actively managing your way out of costly, and expensive legal proceedings.

While you cannot anticipate every emergency, contingency, nor accurately forecast risk, by setting up both a proactive information architecture for your normal 80% of daily content concerns, being able to embrace solutions like what Iron Mountain is aiming for with this acquisition (we’ll see how long it takes to connect the vision to a seamles customer experience), allows you to break down both your normal legacy content walls, and burst up and out to cloud-based offerings to get the best bang for the buck. While I did not use this exact example in a recent webinar on Collaboration (see slides), I believe the graphic is still useful nonetheless.

The next time you’re looking at an overhaul, installation, or minor tweak to your own information architecture, enterprise content management or eDiscovery capabilities, take a look at this graphic and see if you have spent enough time, money and effort to cover your bases adequately.

Destroy and Converge

This general movement of destroying silos or at least virtualizing and providing access across multiple silos of information is a continuing theme (well past it’s time to come to broader light), that we also covered in a past IAM Alert on Present.ly and SharePoint, and which is being covered in a Cloud/SharePoint webinar today, by my colleague Carl Frappaolo (stay tuned for link to the archive).

Expect more on the cloud and virtualization front as enterprises finally take to heart what software startups (and the US Government) has known for many years now. High costs and barriers to the flow of information = bad business, and not just bad legal outcomes.

Are You Embracing Hybrid Strategies?

Weigh in with your success or failure stories, and let’s keep pushing the boundaries. We have a long way to go, but there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in these areas.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, don’t hesitate to get in touch.