Think Spring!

Friday, March 5, 2010 by Doug Yarabinetz
Well this year has started off with a bang!  It's been crazy around the Sherpa office with new business installations as well as existing customer support and upgrades and tons of activitiy around new events, new tools and new resources.  Many of these new resources are designed to share best practices and offer our expertise/thought leadership when it comes to everything from Domino Server Software and Notes mail archives to Exchange email search and PST migration.  We've been discussing everything relating to information management challenges administrators face daily.  You can be part of the discussion too on this blog, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.  Most of these papers, articles, webinars and events are also available on the Sherpa website.

Upcoming events include the Lotus User Group Virtual User Group entitled Keys to Developing Your E-discovery Plan on March 9, 2010 at 12:00 p.m. EST and ADMIN 2010 from May 12-14, 2010 in Boston, MA.  We will also be publishing a white paper and podcast later this month around Exchange 2010....to upgrade or not to upgrade.  In addition to these great resources, please don't forget all of the Sherpa products surrounding Compliance and email and Ediscovery Solutions are available as free downloads on the Sherpa website, and you can also request a free half hour demo if you're interested in learning more.

So dig in and feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, either in person at one of our upcoming events or via our social media.  And if you're on the East Coast like we are, continue digging out as well.  Besides the snow, it's been a great start to the year, but it's also time to Think Spring everyone!



Delaying Delivery of a Message in Lotus Notes

Thursday, March 4, 2010 by Grant Lindsay
Delayed Delivery is a Compliance Attender feature the Sherpa Software Domino Team feels should be in the Notes Mail application natively. It lets the sender of a message decide to postpone the actual delivery of the message until a specified date and time. With Compliance Attender, Delayed Delivery becomes part of the Delivery Options dialog box for every end-user. Here is how the Delivery Options dialog looks with Compliance Attender installed:


The message is sent to the Domino server, where Compliance Attender's Domino server software holds it until that time arrives, at which point, Compliance Attender releases the message for delivery. The effect is the message looks like the sender waited until the exact moment to click "send" on the message.

How can it be used?

Admittedly, there may not appear to be a strong need for a feature like Delayed Delivery. However, consider a couple examples:

The first example is a scenario provided by one of our customers who often applies for government contracts. The application process is quite strict and often involves instructions including, 'do not submit proposals any earlier than X/X/2010 0:00 p.m..' Often the specified time is midnight.

Again, the sender has a few choices. He or she could wait until the beginning of the work day, after the "not before" submission date, and then send the proposal. In practice, however, the receiving agency usually will only consider the first hundred or so proposals. So if the sender were to wait, their proposal may not even be considered. The other choice is to stay up until the required time and then send the message, even if that is not convenient. With Delayed Delivery, the sender can opt to have the message sent at X/X/2010 12:01 a.m. and have the best of both worlds.

Second example, let's say you are up late for whatever reason, checking e-mail and notice a request from a manager or a customer. A quick e-mail will answer the question and get it off your "to do" list. However, you don't want to give the recipient the impression that you are available at all hours.

Again, there are a few available options. First, the message could wait until the morning of the next work day to be sent. Alternately, if you know that you'll keep thinking about it until you reply, compose your reply as draft, then set a reminder to yourself to send the message later. Still, why not let a computer do it for you? With Delayed Delivery, you could compose the reply, set the date and time you want the message to go, and click send. Now, it's off your plate and off your mind.

With Compliance Attender's new Delayed Delivery function, senders can send the message at a more convenient time and specify a date and time for the delivery. The Compliance Attender engine makes sure it gets released for delivery right on time. Of course, all of the other Compliance Attender rules you put into place for content compliance and email journaling are respected when the message is released.

How to get it?

Delayed Delivery is available as part of Compliance Attender (with any of the modules.) A mail template change is required to apply the new Delivery Options dialog box to the mail files and the sender needs to be licensed as an enabled mail account within Compliance Attender.

It is a seemingly small feature, but one you will love once you use it. For more information on this Compliance Attender feature, register for a free trial download.

Developing an Ediscovery Capability

Thursday, March 4, 2010 by Doug Yarabinetz
GET INDEPENDENT ADVICE ON DEVELOPING AN E-DISCOVERY CAPABILITY FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

For the next Lotus User Group Virtual Meeting, Sherpa Software will be presenting a webinar in which Steve Treible, an independent consultant for Intechgration, Inc, an e-discovery and litigation support Services Company, will provide tips on the key areas involved in the e-discovery process and load you up with helpful information and best practices so you can easily develop an e-discovery capability for your organization.

He’ll be joined by our very own Marta Farensbach, Senior Product Manager, E-discovery Division, Sherpa Software. Together these experts in e-discovery will show you real life examples of what’s working for organizations like yours in solving their biggest e-discovery challenges. The presenters will help you uncover the key e-discovery issues you need to understand today and in the future and give you a clear-cut picture of the capabilities you need in order to avoid unnecessary legal risks and e-discovery costs. Plus, you’ll see how E-discovery Compliance can help you manage and avoid employee misbehavior and legal actions; comply with its regulatory obligations; preserve intellectual property, and avoid embarrassing data loss or leaks.

Join LotususerGroup.org for this informative event and get control of e-discovery for your organization. Understand why e-discovery is important, gain insights into the issues and regulations that are most pertinent, and then start creating strategies, capabilities, and technologies to meet needs that will also help manage corporate data properly. These Ediscovery Solutions can help meet at least some of your information management challenges.

Date: March 09, 2010
Time: 12:00 noon Eastern (GMT -5)

This presentation is free to LotusUserGroup.org members but requires pre-registration. Register today at http://www.LotusUserGroup.org/VUG

How Do You Manage What You Don’t Know About?

Thursday, March 4, 2010 by Rick Wilson

As email administrators, one of our information management challenges is to monitor the activity on the Exchange server and implement policies to control email data storage. Unfortunately that is just a portion of the ESI data that might be relevant to your company. A recent study conducted by a litigation support firm determined that only 57% of U.S. and 39% of UK corporations have mechanisms to preserve potentially relevant data when litigation or a regulatory investigation is anticipated. Since preserving email server data is comparatively easy – we suspect that a large percentage of the data that is not preserved resides in PST files. 

We talk to dozens of email administrators and almost universally they tell us that their Outlook users have not idea that they are creating PST file data when they see this helpful window pop up on their desktop:

Outlook Autoarchive Screen 

Even though the box clearly identifies the location of the PST file – desktop users oftern push the Yes without reading the text – or worse yet,  they check the ‘Don’t prompt me’ option causing the archive PST to be automatically updated in the future.

If your organization needs to preserve ESI for ediscovery compliance purposes, Sherpa has two PST tools to help you manage the data on user desktops that you may not know about:

  • PST Backup Attender is a decentralized product that you can distribute to each desktop using a group policy. Once it installs, the desktop agent will automatically scan the local fixed drives for PST data then enforce a backup (or retention) policy that was installed along with the agent. Backups can be directed at any UNC path in your network (on a scheduled basis) so you begin to build a centralized repository of the PST messages that may be used for disaster recovery or e-discovery purposes.
  • Mail Attender also offers a desktop agent component. Once deployed and installed on a workstation the agent scans for PST files then ‘phones home’ to the Mail Attender server it is registered with and reports what it has discovered. Within minutes the desktop PST files show up as email stores in the Mail Attender console and administrators may begin creating rules to move, copy, delete or compress PST data resident on the desktop.

Just because you don't know about PST message data does not mean you cannot manage it! To learn more about either of these Sherpa products, register for a 1/2 hour demo today!

PST files in the cloud

Saturday, February 27, 2010 by Srinivasan Balaji

Sherpa Software's professional services arm is picking up some steam. Although all of Sherpa's email management products for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange have been built to be simple to deploy and use with minimal support, there have been occasional requests from customers over the years, for assistance in configuring our products to meet their specific needs or in some cases even help in formulating their requirements. Several instances of this last request has prompted one of our blog authors, Denny Russell, to write a 7-part series on developing email retention policies.

About a year ago, Sherpa began offering professional services as a formal add-on to our products. During that time, there have been requests to perform on-site installations of our products, assist with eDiscovery compliance, solve email data storage problems, help enforce corporate retention policies, offer formal training on our products and resolve other information management challenges. Lately, perhaps reflecting market trends, there have been a number of requests for help with PST migration into cloud data repositories. Most of these engagements involve the consolidation of data from multiple PST files, distributed throughout an organization on fileservers and on users' desktops, into a single, central repository from where this archived PST data may be collected and shipped to a cloud vendor. Using Sherpa's PST tools and our expertise in PST management, Sherpa offers customers a flexible array of options to accomplish this.

So if you decide to move your email to the cloud and have historical data in PST files needing to be migrated, contact Sherpa Software; we may be able to help.

Soft Deletions and LotusScript

Friday, February 26, 2010 by Jeff Tujetsch

Trying to locate a soft deletion in LotusScript can be an information management challenge itself. Before soft deletions, it was easy to navigate the $Trash folder and find the deletions. However, soft deletions add another level of complexity. If you have the UNID of a message and try to access it when it has been soft-deleted, an error will be thrown stating that the UNID was invalid. This is actually the same error you would receive if the message was hard-deleted and no longer existed.

However, since the UNID is not viable for finding a soft-deleted message, there is a way to locate the soft-deleted message. The NoteID property remains accessible for both soft-deleted messages and those messages that are hard-deleted, but whose deletion stub still exists (typically, for 120 days after the message is hard-deleted). This allows you to use the 'GetDocumentByID' method within the NotesDatabase class and use the NoteID to locate the message. If the 4270 error is thrown, neither the message, soft-deletion or deletion stub exists. If an error is not thrown, that doesn't mean that you have all of the information that you need. You still have more work to do. Here are the four scenarios.

1. If the NotesDocument is properly instantiated, then you need to check the IsDeleted property. If the IsDeleted property returns False, you have located an 'active' message. If the IsDeleted property returns True, you have located a soft-deleted message.

2. If the NotesDocument is not instantiated (Doc is Nothing), you have located the deletion stub for the message.

3. If the 4270 error is thrown, the message and its deletion stub, no longer exist.

If have included the code to display the four possible scenarios below:

On Error Goto TrapError

Dim CurrentDB As NotesDatabase
Dim Doc As NotesDocument
Dim InvalidNoteID As Integer
Dim Session As New NotesSession

Set CurrentDB = Session.CurrentDatabase

InvalidNoteID = 0

Set Doc = CurrentDB.GetDocumentByID ("xxxxxxxx")

If InvalidNoteID = 0 Then
   If Doc Is Nothing Then
      Print "Deletion stub"
   Elseif Doc.IsDeleted Then
      Print "Soft deletion"
   Else
      Print "Active message"
   End If
Else
   Print "No message"
End If

Exit Sub

TrapError:

Select Case Err
   Case 4270
      InvalidNoteID = 1
      Resume Next
   Case Else
      Print Error + " (" + Cstr (Err) + " )  at line " + Cstr (Erl)
      End
End Select


I hope that this helps with understanding how to access soft-deletions, deletion stubs and better understand this email data storage issue.

Sherpa Blog Roundup

Thursday, February 25, 2010 by Kristen Parise
Once again, here is a roundup of recent articles and blog posts that have us at Sherpa Software talking. We hope you find these articles interesting as you continue to tackle your information management challenges.

Information Governance - The Evolution of Email Archiving?


The email archiving systems space has changed and evolved dramatically since it was created to deal with Microsoft Exchange mailbox management. From there, SEC and NASD compliance requirements led to the creation of mail server journaling and the need to archive journaled email as well as instant messages and other communications sent by broker-dealers. See full post at: http://grokify.com/2010/02/23/information-governance-the-evolution-of-email-archiving/

IT pros divided about security of virtualization, cloud computing

Is moving to virtualization and cloud computing making network security easier or harder? When some 2,100 top IT and security managers in 27 countries were asked, the response revealed a profound lack of consensus, showing how divided attitudes are within the enterprise. See full post at: http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/it-pros-divided-about-security-virtualization-cloud-computing-439?source=rss_infoworld_news

Everything you wanted to know about email archiving but were afraid to ask

Email archiving isn’t just about efficient systems admin and business continuity. In a new white paper data, network and telephony management specialist InTechnology sets out some of the key legal, compliance and email considerations you need to take into account when planning your archiving strategy. See full post at: http://www.legaltechpressblog.com/?p=85

How do we Inspire Young People to Work in IT?

I am a regular speaker at San Francisco State University's Masters Program - where they dedicate one night each Information Systems semester to my presentation and discussion of IT Governance. At each of these classes I ask the approximately 30 students if any of them plan to pursue a career in IT. I rarely see a hand raised. This reality has been supported by a number of studies I have seen showing that graduate and post graduate degrees in the IT field have been steadily declining. See full post at: http://community.ca.com/blogs/theitgovernanceevangelist/archive/2010/02/19/how-do-we-inspire-young-people-to-work-in-it.aspx

Who sets objectives: Legal, Business or IT?


A majority of organizations are relying on legal counsel to establish objectives for the integrity, availability and confidentiality of information.

However, for the 7-in-10 organizations using legal counsel to drive and manage these information management challenges, the track-record is mixed, with data-loss and theft rates ranging from 3 events per year to as many as 15 such events. See full post at: http://itpcg.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/whos-sets-objectives-legal-business-lines-or-it/

Sherpa Software Lotusphere Highlights Video

Friday, February 12, 2010 by Kristen Parise
The Sherpa Software Domino team had a great time meeting with enthusiastic Lotus/Domino professionals and talking to them about their information management challenges.

This quick video highlights just some of the fun we had at the Swan & Dolphin this past year. The Sherpa Software team is looking forward to talking about the future of Domino server software at our next event, ADMIN 2010, May 12-14, 2010.

Sherpa Blog Roundup

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Kristen Parise
Part of what it means to be a Sherpa, both on Mt. Everest and at Sherpa Software, includes sharing the most relevant information to help everyone navigate the rocky terrain better. We would like to share some information from recent stories and web postings that may help you navigate the archiving and compliance terrain.

The rise of Email Archiving systems - http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,2000592206b,00. (Original post by InTechnology)

WHITE PAPER: Email Archiving - Legal & Compliance Considerations. Download Here: http://www.intechnology.co.uk/MainPage.aspx?ID=20 (Original post by InTechnology)

Osterman Research Survey Results on SaaS Email Archiving Highlights ... http://bit.ly/cSfJwB (Original post by FreeSurveyEbook)

Quick reference card: Most common tasks in #IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1 - http://bit.ly/bQksNx - #lotusknows ~@geldred (Original post by IBM LotusKnows)

Details of Office 2020 free upgrade leaked to Web (Original post by InfoWorld)

Microsoft may launch new Office cloud license (Original post by InfoWorld)

Domino Server Software Slow? Have you checked... (Original post by LotusEvangelist)

Compliance and Email Worries Drive Archiving... www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Compliance-Worries-Drive-EMail-Archiving-Market/ (Original post by Sarron_Corp)

Part 2: Driving Factors to Your Email Retention Policy

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Denny Russell
Before you can ever look at email archiving systems, you have to determine what factors are driving the need to manage your data.  Many things can and will drive your policy.  The most common concerns or drivers include legal, human resources and IT. It is up to your company to determine what are the right drivers to consider, however, several factors will always be a consideration.
  1. Space issues
  2. Legal/litigation concerns
  3. Federal regulations
First, the right people need to be involved before you can truly figure out what is driving the need to create a policy.  Those people will most likely be:
  1. IT 
  2. Legal/HR
These two groups will have varying perspectives and concerns when it comes to building this policy.  IT will be coming from a email data storage angle, trying to keep space/storage to a minimum and will worry about how long backups run and speed issues. Legal/HR will be coming from a 'protect the company' angle.  They don't necessarily care about space issues or how long backups take, they just want the right data and only the right data when they need it.  Balancing these two perspectives is not an easy battle, but it can be managed better if everyone is on the same page.

Both sides really need to focus on the good of the company in every email and compliance decision they make.  If Legal or Litigation concerns arise, they will always win.  Disk space is cheap and can always be added on later.  Not having the documents the court requires will cost way more than you'll ever spend on email data storage.

To begin working these issues out, first figure out how your industry is affected by Federal, State and/or Local regulations.  If regulation is a driving factor, interpret the laws and build a policy accordingly and will problably not allow much freedom in your policy.  If regulation is not a factor, then figure out what policy works best for the company as a whole.  For now, just figure out what is driving your decision.

There are many resources that can help you with this:
In future articles we will talk about where to store the data, access the data and many other things.

Part 1: Building Email Rentention Policies

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Denny Russell
One of the many things I focus on in my day job is Email Management.  Helping customers once they've built a Compliance and Email Management policy is usually where I come in.   When installing our Email Archiving Systems, I tend to ask a lot of questions trying to find out what the reasoning is behind their decisions.  What stuns me most, is how many of these policies are not well planned or thought out. Many times, the companies buy the software first, then decide to build a policy around it.  Others have a plan in place but haven't asked all the necessary questions.  I try to bring these questions up and create more discussion to help them get the right documentation in place before they get started.

So, this has prompted me to build a series of posts on this very subject.  I plan to take a deep dive into what you should be thinking about as you build an Email Retention Policy and look to find a software to implement your policy.

At the current time, I have a 7 part series planned.  As I start to write, I'm hoping that it evolves into much more.  My goal is to build documentation that can help anyone with any Information Management Challenges they may face.

Initially, I plan to have topics on the following:
  1. Who and what are driving your policy?
  2. What data do you need to keep?
  3. Data storge and access
  4. What to look for in a solution
  5. Remember the End-users - How does it affect them?
  6. E-discovery and litigation - Are you ready?
  7. Key points to remember
So check back often and feel free to share your thoughts and ideas.  Most importantly, let me know what challenges you've faced.

Learning from the Mistakes of Others

Thursday, February 4, 2010 by Grant Lindsay

Missing emails from an account used by James Oblinger, North Carolina State University's former Chancellor, have landed the university in hot water including a federal grand jury investigation to find whether former North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley used his position to influence the hiring of his wife to a $170,000 a year job at N.C. State.

In response to a subpoena, lawyers for the university have admitted they could not locate six months of Oblinger's email, from January to June 11, 2005. In actuality, the university's IT department has failed to produce these email messages. As a result, the judge could issue a default adverse judgment. In other words, those deciding the case could be instructed to assume the worst; that relevant email messages were destroyed deliberately, whether it was the case or not. Clearly, not a good situation for either the IT department or the university [1].

Hearing stories like this should make IT departments think "How would my IT department have faired if this happened at our organization?" The lesson is this: get a records retention policy in place and follow it up with implementing mail archiving software to support the policy.

Naturally, a follow up question would be, "isn't archiving email messages enough?"

However, it depends on what archiving means to you. If archiving means periodically harvesting messages from the users' mail files and storing those for later searches, then no, is not enough. This approach to an email archiving system is too sensitive to user activity. Senders may not save their messages or the recipients may delete or even alter them. As a result, an archive produced in this way will be either incomplete, inaccurate or both. Organizations need a better approach to compliance and email management.

The best solution would be to capture messages in real time, as they are in transit at the Domino server, and before they arrive at the recipients' in-boxes. Through intercepting messages, IT and management can be certain the message is preserved in its original form. Further, the repository of these messages, a.k.a. the journal, could be locked down so that its contents remain unaltered while awaiting ediscovery compliance requests.

Compliance Attender provides this functionality combined with an easy to use interface for maintaining email rules and repositories. Please contact a Sherpa sales representative for a demonstration or download a free trial version to test Compliance Attender for your organization.


[1] You can read more about this story at The News & Observer. In addition, Ferris Research makes some observations on this case.


Preparing for Exchange 2010

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by Kristen Parise
Exchange admins from all over have been asking lots of questions surrounding Exchange 2010. One question asked in particular is how the release of Exchange 2010 is going to affect third party email archiving systems, including Sherpa Software's Archive Attender

Microsoft has made it clear their intent is to support larger mailboxes, and there are a number of enhancements in Exchange 2010 (I/O reductions, changes to the physical layout of the database, better management tools, etc) supporting this goal.  With regard to archiving, however, Sherpa Software believes it is important to examine all of your email data storage needs- not just the narrow set of features that 2010 offers. 

For example, if managing the physical storage requirement of the Exchange database is important, then the peer mailbox mechanism of archiving in 2010 is not very helpful since it forces archived messages to reside in the same storage group. The same can be said of the limited policies available to move data into the archive Exchange mailbox, the relatively anemic e-discovery search facility and the inability to ingest PST data. 

In light of these limitations, the Sherpa Exchange Team believes there will continue to be a need for more robust third-party products such as Archive Attender even after customers migrate to Exchange 2010.  Sherpa's development team is currently hard at work testing Archive Attender and addressing some of the small MAPI inconsistencies cropping up in the lab. Sherpa is also working with the recently released beta version of Outlook 2010 and will continue ensuring Archive Attender will fully support Exchange 2010 early in the first quarter of 2010.

Will Exchange 2010 Answer Searching Needs?

Monday, February 1, 2010 by Kristen Parise
Some of the advanced features in the newly unveiled Exchange 2010 have a number of people asking if all their Exchange email search needs can be handled in the Exchange environment.  Native archiving, retention, litigation hold and E-discovery features have been added or improved in Exchange 2010.  However, the key question is will these improvements be enough? This article will discuss the multi-mailbox search along with some additional items to consider when evaluating Exchange 2010.

New features include delegating rights to search mailboxes based on organizational roles (HR, Legal, Compliance etc.).   The multi-mailbox search incorporates an easy to use interface that is head and shoulders above the old power-shell scripting.  Available search criteria includes addresses, keywords, dates and even regular expressions; and both primary mailboxes and the new archive stores can be searched.  Unlike previous versions of the native Exchange search, attachments can be searched, and items unable to be indexed can be designated to a specific folder. Also, optional summary and list reports can be generated, while actual result messages can be copied to a designated mailbox or SMTP address.

These new features should prove helpful for the beleaguered Exchange administrators.  However, there are some things to keep in mind:

1) Multi-mailbox search can only search Exchange 2010 mailboxes.  Mailboxes hosted in older versions of Exchange cannot be included in the discovery searches.

2)  Data outside Exchange 2010 cannot be searched. For instance, it will not search a PST file,  common office files stored in file shares or local machines. 

3)  Exchange 2010 multi-mailbox discovery search is based on the indexes created with Exchange email search. Indexing is enabled by default, and has been vastly improved from previous versions.  However, indexing will still add space to your mail store. Microsoft estimates the index will be between 10 and 20% of your database size. 

4)  Because the multi-mailbox search is based on an index, certain keyword criteria such as punctuation and spaces cannot be used.  There is an option available to search items without the index, but this is limited to individual mailboxes.

5) The indexing of attachment types is based on default filters installed with Exchange.  Filters for certain file types may not be included in the default filters (e.g. .pdf) and need to be installed separately, with special care to ensure the 64 bit version is used. 

As evidenced, there are still many information management challenges presented with the new Exchange email search features in Exchange 2010. This will continue to be a topic of much debate and we will continue to weigh in. Check back for more updates!

Best Practices and Procedures for Building Effective Email Policies

Monday, January 25, 2010 by Kristen Parise
Sherpa Software's Denny Russell, Senior Product Specialist, recently wrote an article for Computer Technology Review entitled "Best Practices and Procedures for Building Effective Email Policies." This article gives IT administrators and managers a foundational basis for building email policies that will serve both external constraints and end-users' needs. Anyone considering email archiving systems and/or storage discovery tools will find some great advice in this article. Here is an excerpt:

Implementing email retention, compliance or E-discovery software can be one of the most important tasks an organization performs.  Without a solid policy behind the software investment, companies risk wasting time and money.

IT professionals have a critical role in ensuring the success of email retention, compliance, or e-Discovery software implementations.  The first step is to decide who should be involved in defining your organization’s email policies.  Understand how your business is affected by various government and industry standards, and then take the time to carefully think out your policy, documenting each step.

Read the full article

Archiving to the cloud, is it what you want?

Monday, January 25, 2010 by Denny Russell
Now a days, you really can't go too far with out finding some article pushing a cloud technology.  In fact, at Lotusphere 2010 last week, they talked about a cloud strategy.  So it got me thinking about what people want with the cloud.

Dealing with email retention policies and data management on a daily basis, I have to look at the cloud from that perspective.  So take a moment and think about your  Email Data Storage plan and think about what you keep and why you keep it. 
  • What are your responsibilities with this data? 
  • How quickly do you need to produce this data when your compliance and email policy is questioned?
  • Who needs access to this data?
  • Can you ensure the integrity of the data?
All of these are valid questions as you work to define an email retention policy. Now think about your data being stored in a cloud and ask the same questions.
  • Do your answers change?
  • Would you trust your data being stored in a cloud?
I sat in on a few sessions at Lotusphere and conducted a Birds of a Feather on Email Retention Policy Best Practices and not once did I hear the cloud being accepted by anyone who dealt with policies or litigation issues.  So it really got me wondering, what people want from the "cloud".

I'm really curious to hear the thoughts of our viewers as well.

Lotusphere 2010

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Denny Russell
Back from yet another Lotusphere working the Sherpa booth.  I'm exhausted, yet happy to have experienced it.  Lotusphere 2010 was another great example of the strong following the Lotus Notes and Domino world has established.  The 'Lotus Knows' campaign was in full swing everywhere you went and echoed to the crowd that it was not only listening to what the users wanted but delivering as well.   Many announcements were made this week regarding cloud strategies, Lotus Vulcan and other items.  Yet the most exciting thing for many in attendance, was the fact that their annual guess for Opening General Session speaker was finally correct. Yes, William Shatner came out and talked to the crowd of roughly 5,000 attendees.

The sessions I attended were great and the traffic at the booth was steady. While demoing our Domino server software, I spoke with many new people getting a feel for their needs with regard to Email Archiving and e-discovery software.  At the Birds of a Feather conducted by myself and fellow Sherpa, Jeff Tujetsch, we spoke to a nice group of people about compliance and email.  Many in attendance found it interesting that the laws differ so widely from company to company and country to country.

Walking the showcase floor I did notice less Vendor Pedestals than in the past and have to wonder why so many didn't make the show.  Over the last few years, Sherpa has celebrated the longevity of our company and products at Lotusphere.  Being there once again serves as further proof that we will still be there to support our customers and talk with new ones for years to come.  We also had a winner each day walk away with a free TV and we still have our on-going virtual scavenger hunt for the $500 grand prize.  Good luck to those who participate.

It was great to see so many familiar faces at this year's Lotusphere and also to make many new friends.  Before you know it, we will be doing this all over again.

Journaling vs. Archiving

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Grant Lindsay

Managing an organization's email server archive can seem like a night time hike over rocky ground. There are frequently conflicting requirements and policies ready to trip you up (storage constraints, e-discovery demands, legal compliance, user access, etc.) Even the terminology can be confusing. For example, what would you say is meant by the term archiving? How is that related to journaling? Do you need either one or are they really just two terms for the same thing?

In this post, we'll consider these questions to help you navigate your organization over some rough terrain. First, some definitions.

Archiving is the process of moving a message from one data store to another. This is usually a user-centric function being done so a mail user has later access to a message not stored in their main mail file. Often, there is a 1:1 relationship between the primary mail file and the archive. Thus, each user has access their own archive.

Archiving is a kind of agreement between the e-mail administrator and the users being supported. On one hand, the administrator frees up space on expensive, primary server storage while, on the other hand, the user retains access to the moved messages.

Journaling is the process of copying a message from one data store to another. You may have heard the term 'compliance archive' in this context too, but this term clouds the distinction between 'compliance' and 'regular' archiving. Also, while archiving usually happens some time after the message has been sent and received, sometimes months later, journaling is most effective when it happens as early as possible in the message's life.

Journaling is a company-centric management technique and is done to demonstrate compliance and facilitate e-discovery. Unlike archives, typical users generally have little to do with the journaled messages.

Reasons

We can see from the above that archiving and journaling, though similar in some ways, are quite different in their intent and the needs they serve. Still, the question remains, why do you need to worry about archiving and journaling? Here are some reasons:

Archiving

Server Performance Moving messages off the mail server will greatly increase its performance. Server house-keeping tasks will perform better and backup windows will shrink.
Efficient Search and Retrieval for Users Depending on the archive policy you implement, your users may find that they rarely need to access the archive, but when they do, they will usually be looking for a particular email. Therefore, the archive needs to be searchable.
End-user Convenience For good or bad, email tends to be a repository for business content. Being able to retain this content and have it within easy reach is important for your end users. Also, mail applications will open faster, providing a better user experience.
Email Administrator Convenience Budget freezes mean that email administrators need to get more out of less. Moving messages off to less expensive secondary storage allows them to do that.

Journaling

Efficient E-discovery Response During litigation, the email administrator may be asked to produce all relevant messages in the email server storage for a certain period.
Compliance and Security Relying on end users to retain email messages for compliance is often not satisfactory. A journaling system will securely retain a copy of messages even after all other copies have been deleted.
Administrator Convenience The right journaling solution, once configured and tuned, should be low-touch and efficient, using secondary storage and reducing back up windows.

Conclusion

It is a challenge to balance all these needs successfully. However, with planning and the right tools, it is possible to smooth the rocky road of email server archive and journal management.

To see the benefits of archiving and journaling in action, be sure to check out Sherpa Software's email archiving systems, compliance software and storage discovery tools by registering for a demonstration today.

Sherpa Products in the news

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Srinivasan Balaji
Sherpa Software's award-winning flagship Mail Exchange software, Mail Attender for Exchange, was recently reviewed by Nathan Winters At Windows IT Pro. Here is a link to the full review.

Also, as mentioned in Doug's blog post, an eDiscovery white paper, contributed to by Marta Farensbach, Sherpa's Product Manager for Discovery Attender for Exchange, is now available. You can register for and download it here.

New E-discovery White Paper and Webinar

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 by Doug Yarabinetz

Sherpa Software's Marta Farensbach, Senior Product Manager, will be joining Michael Osterman and other ediscovery experts for this look at ediscovery in 2010.  Marta also contributed to the white paper entitled "The Concise Guide to Ediscovery."  Register for this live event on Tuesday, January 28 at 2:00 p.m. EST or download the informative white paper below.  Both should be valuable tools as you explore Ediscovery compliance and your mail archiving softtware options for 2010.


What You Need to Know About E-Discovery for 2010 -Webinar

Join Michael Osterman of Osterman Research and ediscovery experts from Mimosa Systems, Recommind and Sherpa Software on Thursday, January 28th at 2:00pm EST, 11:00am PST, 17:00 UK Time, for a Webinar focused specifically on e-discovery.

Click here to sign up for this Webinar


The Concise Guide to E-Discovery-Whitepaper

The goal of this white paper is to provide an introduction to the key areas involved in developing an e-discovery capability and to help organizations plan to become better prepared for the rigors of the e- discovery process. Note that the goal of this report is not to offer legal advice or legal opinions on specific legal issues related to e-discovery, and it should not be used in this manner.

Click here to download the white paper