Categorization has become important to email management as organizations seek to apply retention management policies that meet the guidelines for the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. One way to categorize messages is to use Outlook 2007 categories. The ability to manually and automatically categorize messages from directly within Outlook makes it easy to deploy and organizations will find that they already have the capability without needing to license new software. Additionally, some email archiving solutions can apply retention periods based on Outlook categories making it worth investigating.
Outlook 2007 improves upon the categorization available in Outlook 2003. In addition to maintaining the ability to categorize manually and automatically using Outlook rules, Outlook 2007 provides a more integrated categorization experience by building in categorization into the right-click menu and other areas.
The “Create a new color category” Microsoft Office Online tutorial shows how easy it can be to assign categories using the toolbar.
Custom keyboard shortcuts can also be assigned as shown below:
You can also categorize a message by right clicking the message in the message list pane to bring up the right-click menu as shown in this vinf.net blog post:
This post from Alik Levin shows the menu you get by right clicking the category icon directly in addition to showing how Outlook displays a message assigned to two categories:
Once you have your items categorized, Melissa MacBeth, Program Manager for Outlook, shows us how to arrange messages by category:
Melissa’s post also shows us some naming conventions that can be used such as prefixing category names with a period and @ sign:
Links
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional includes a built-in ability to Bates Number large numbers of PDF files. If your litigation produces PDF files, Acrobat 8 Professional could be the way to go. This post provides a quick primer on Acrobat’s capability with links to more detailed information. An upcoming post will cover the enhancements made in Acrobat 9 Professional.
This Adobe blog article covers Bates Numbering including a number of screenshots. A couple of highlights include the following.
Adding files:
Configuring the layout
This Adobe Design Center page provides some screenshots on a graphical PDF page.
Configuring the layout on a graphical page
The final graphical page
A potential problem with Acrobat’s XML Tag method for Bates Numbering is mentioned in this Appligent Labs post which states:
So, instead of simply correctly numbering each and every page; applications that attempt to use this information will need to calculate the Bates number based on the above XML attributes. Easy enough; except, lawyers tend to split documents apart and append them back together in different ways. So, in some cases, this mechanism will be worse then useless, because the wrong number will be returned.
Additional Links
As E-Discovery moves to native format files a recurring topic is how to perform Bates Numbering. Traditionally, Bates Numbering was applied to TIFF and PDF static images since virtually any native format ESI could be turned into page-based static files with numbering applied. The issues with Bates Numbering and native format files include:
Advice to address these issues are to Bates Stamp the native file itself and not individual pages. Individual pages can be referenced per Bates Stamped file as described by Greg Fordham:
For a long time, the justification for converting native documents to TIFF or PDF was for bates numbering so that each individual page could be numbered. A best practice for native format documents would be to bates number the file itself with a prefixed number. It is really not different than if a large book was produced. In such a case would one bates number each page of the book or would one assign a unique number to the book and then reference individual pages.
FindLaw writes the following:
Alteration of Files
If producing in native format it is important to take precautions to protect the documents from alteration. Annotations with Bates numbers, confidentiality designations, and redacting is not possible without altering the native document. Therefore, work off a copy of the file, to ensure the original remains un-altered.
…
Modified filename to include the original filename, the beginning bates number and the original extension. e.g., “Document.CDN000080.doc.”
Links
There has been much debate regarding the use of taxonomies and folksonomies within the enterprise. Taxonomies are controlled vocabularies created by an organization in a top-down approach while folksonomies allow anyone to participate in the classification scheme in a bottom-up approach and are very popular on the web in the form of social tagging and bookmarking. Traditional records management professionals seem to prefer top-down taxonomies and debate the usefulness of folksonomies within enterprises.
As folksonomies become more prevalent in mainstream products, it may be a challenge to stem the tied and stay the course with a taxonomy approach only but it is possible. As an example, Outlook 2007 categories are often presented as a user-driven folksonomy system that is seeing mainstream deployment now.
Some articles on the taxonomy vs. folksonomy debate are presented below:
Clearwell Systems announced Transparent Search on August 26, 2008. This is a set of features built around the ability to inspect and perform filtering on wildcard, proximity, fuzzy, and concept searches. The features built around this core capability include: search preview, search filters, search report, and multiple query searches. This post uses screenshots captured from the Clearwell Online demo and descriptions from the press release. The Flash demo is currently available on the homepage and well worth watching.
The following is a composite of two screenshots to show the high level messaging comparing the hit report for traditional search with the more detailed information provided by a transparent search breakdown of wildcard search results. To view any of the screenshots in fullsize, click on the screenshot to bring it up on your screen.
1. Search Preview: Provides visibility into matching keyword variations for wildcard and stemming searches prior to running a search. Users can selectively include relevant variations or exclude false positive variations in their search query, removing irrelevant documents from search results.
This feature shows you how may documents match a wildcard or proximity search and what text is being matched. The checkboxes allow granular fine-tuning of inclusion and exclusion words. While the description says this provides matching variations prior to running a search, to retrieve the number of matched do documents, presumably searches have already been performed but not presented to the user.
2. Search Filters: In real-time, users can filter results by individual queries or variations, and sample the filtered documents to evaluate the effectiveness of their search. This also provides more opportunities for users to rapidly identify false positive documents prior to review.
In addition to selecting and deselecting matching terms in the preview stage, users can adjust the filters on a real-time ad-hoc basis to perform sampling to assess under and over inclusiveness. Search filters automatically expand all variations of advanced searches including wildcard and proximity searches. A list of keyword variations and document counts that can be sampled.
3. Multiple Query Search: Delivers the ability to run large numbers of queries simultaneously and provides reporting for both the overall search and the individual queries within the search. Large numbers of queries can be tested in minutes not days, dramatically decreasing the turnaround time needed to iterate and evaluate the effectiveness of keyword searches.
Multiple Query Search is useful for cutting and pasting multiple search terms from say a MS Word document directly into Clearwell. Ten queries are shown in the example and can be run at once allowing you to quickly see how many hits are returned for each query. Under each query is a drill down for the specific variations found.
4. Search Report: Creates a comprehensive report that documents all search criteria and provides detailed analytics of the results for both the overall search and the individual queries within the search. The report tracks search terms that were included and excluded during search preview providing a defensible audit trail of search refinement decisions.
This report provides the results of the search preview and search filters and can be used in Meet and Confer preparation report.
Overall, Clearwell’s Transparent Search is designed to perform more defensible search through detailed reporting, better collaboration on search terms by providing granular terms for negotiation, and the ability to reduce false positives by eliminating word variations from the search results. Check out their website for more information and online demos.
Sources for screenshots and quotes: clearwellsystems.com.
Recommind Decisiv™ Email is a method of semi- or fully- automating email categorization that works with Microsoft Outlook. By automating categorization of email, it addresses one of the largest issues with email records management and the ability for organizations to delete non-business email to reduce information risk. Decisiv Email was originally announced on June 4, 2007.
The issue organizations are faced with when applying records management to email is the sheer volume of email that user’s have to deal with. Decisiv Email handles this by automatically providing suggestions for filing, prompting users to file, and informing users where an email has been filed. Emails can be either retained in Outlook or not. A very useful feature and one that I am a proponent of is the ability to file documents to multiple folders. One method would be file it to multiple Exchange folders or folders within Outlook exposed as a MAPI store. The folders Decisiv Email uses for filing appears to be their own folders and it would be useful to see if they can be presented as Exchange folders or within Outlook as a MAPI provider.
The user interface is integrated directly into MS Outlook as shown in this screenshot from Recommind’s website:
For storage savings, Recommind claims “by allowing only business records to be stored and utilizing an innovative single instance storage infrastructure, Decisiv Email delivers up to 500 percent in storage savings over traditional e-mail archiving systems.” More specific numbers aren’t mentioned so let’s take a closer look. In RIM (records management), if a document is not a business record (or draft), it should be deleted. For example, if only 5% of email is considered a business record and a typical user sends and receives 100 emails daily, then Decisiv is only storing 5 emails for the user and 95 messages should be deleted from the mail server. So Decisiv will be storing 5% of the email stored by a non-RIM solution. With SIS, Recommind further deduplicates information to “the lowest unique subpart.” This likely includes the ability to perform SIS on the same attachments within different email messages. Attachments make up an increasingly large proportion of e-mail storage requirements and some traditional e-mail archiving solutions cannot provide SIS at this level, so this will also achieve high storage savings.
Traditional email archiving solutions that perform mailbox stubbing is not provided so the typical mailbox storage reduction of up to 80% is not achieved. To provide storage relief on the mail server, disposition policies must be used to remove that email from the mail server which can be performed either by Recommind or the mail server itself.
Recommind Decisiv Email provides a way for organizations to deploy semi- and fully-automated records management approaches for classification within Microsoft Outlook. Efficient categorization to organizational taxonomies allows Decisiv to be leveraged for records retention and disposition which will reduce information risk exposure.
Additional information is available on the Recommind product page and this Gardere press release. Gardere has over 300 attorneys and 1000 users.
NAS, or network attached storage, has become a convenient way to host large amounts of files on the network. Andy Kass and Willem R. van den Berge respond to Calvin Smith’s question as presented below.
Subject: Concordance on NAS
From: Andy Kass
Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 3:14 am
URL: http://www.litigation-support.org/viewtopic.php?t=16712Calvin,
In short: Don’t.
Concordance wants to see a Windows file system, preferably NTFS. Emulation is in the eye of the beholder, and the performance hit may not be close enough for locking or access purposes. Add in probable performance issues with the kind of drives usually found in NAS devices, and you’ll see why putting the database on NAS is a bad idea.
On the other hand, 90% of your space requirement will probably be images, native files and load files. This is what should go on your NAS, since they are essentially archival once loaded anyway. Put your database on DASD, where the performance is high and backup simple.
My 2 cents.
Andy
Andy Kass
Array Technology Group LLC
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
Subject: Any Issues w/ Concordance DBs Running On A NAS Device?
From: Calvin Smith
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 4:09 PM
URL: http://www.litigation-support.org/viewtopic.php?t=16723Dear listmates,
The NAS device uses a CIFS file system to simulate a Windows share.
So we would need to know:
Are there any known issues with Concordance 2007 running off a share on a NAS device?
Does Concordance 2007 require any type of software to be installed on the server/OS?
Thank you in advance for any input that you can share.
Calvin Smith - Project Manager
http://www.CalvinSmithSoftware.com/litsupport
http://www.linkedin.com/in/calvinsmithsoftwaredotcom
Subject: Any Issues w/ Concordance DBs Running On A NAS Device?
From: Willem R. van den Berge
Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 5:41 pm
URL: http://www.litigation-support.org/viewtopic.php?t=16723Calvin,
Unfortunately the answer has to be: “It depends on the NAS device”
All NAS devices that can be accessed from windows machines implement the SMB (Server Message Block, sometimes referred to as CIFS) protocol. Depending on the accuracy of the implementation you may or may not have
problems. If you are having problems they are almost always locking related.There are essentially two methods of locking. File locking is implemented largely by the NAS device. This allows an application to open a file for exclusive access and the NAS device will enforce that lock.
Things become more complicated when you’re talking about record or bucket locking. This allows an application to lock only part of a file so it can modify it while another application or another instance of the same application can read and even write another part of the file. Bucket locking can be implemented in two different ways. It can be implemented solely by the application, which will, (usually) make it a tad bit slower but much more reliable across different NAS devices. Bucket locking can also be implemented by using some functions provided by the SMB protocol on the NAS device. This is slightly faster but if the SMB implementation is not exactly right you may have problems.
MS Access definitely uses the second method of bucket locking, while I’m pretty sure Concordance uses the first. This would explain why Concordance works fine while Access has a problem if the SMB implementation of your NAS device is even a little off.
The safest way to go is to use a NAS device that uses embedded Windows or Windows Storage Edition (The Dell NX1950 comes to mind but there are many more). These are essentially Windows fileservers that are wrapped in a spiffy user interface that is supposed to make them easier to manage.
Alternatively I’ve had positive experiences with the SMB implementations by Veritas and EMC. The jury is still out on the Solaris CIFS server which came out in 2007.
I’ve had negative experiences with many of the smaller (read cheaper) standalone devices that usually implement some version of Samba (on some version of Linux) or FreeNAS (on FreeBSD). I’ve also had trouble with earlier SMB implementations by Apple but I have not looked at their stuff for several years.
Just my 2cts,
Wim
Willem R. van den Berge
Vice President of Technology Services
WVandenberge@altep.comAltep, Inc.
Innovative Litigation Solutions
7450 Remcon Circle
El Paso, Texas 79912
915 533-8722
800 263-0940
Fax 915 533-8895
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One of the questions I run across is in regards to who is a custodian, primarily whether custodians tend to be system administrators or individual end users. Often times, it can be argued either way. Here are some sample definitions:
Part of the confusion is that the use of the word depends on the context. The EDRM Metrics provide the most structured approach to this that I’ve seen so far. Here is a graphical representation of the EDRM custodian definitions:
You can view the definitions by moving your cursor over each of the following links. The original source information is available on the EDRM site as MindManager or MS Word files.
I’ve found the more granular definitions useful in explaining the general concept of a custodian. Has anyone else also found the EDRM definitions useful?
ESI data maps and their creation have become an important topic in the wake of the amendments to the FRCP which extend coverage to ESI. Data maps are a proactive eDiscovery tool similar to archiving and search solutions which can shorten the effort needed per case. This post provides a brief introduction data maps.
Why Data Maps?
FRCP Rule 26(f)’s 99 day timeline for the Meet and Confer is one of the primary drivers for data maps and can have a large impact on a case. Key considerations are as follows:
What Should Data Maps Contain?
The data map is designed to provide the information needed to create the proposed discovery plan under Rule 26(f)(3). The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland’s Suggested Protocol for Discovery of Electronically Stored Information (PDF) is a useful source and provides examples of what can be included in the data map, especially paragraph 6 and paragraph 7. The data map should cover document and record types, and can be broken down by function, department or division. The following information should be listed for each document or record type:
How to Create a Data Map
A data map covers records from all parts of the organization and requires a multi-department approach. The following provide a guideline for creating a data map.
Additional step-by-step information is available in this How to Create an E-Discovery Data Map article.
What Happens If I Overlook ESI?
When responding to eDiscovery requests, organizations may overlook sources of data such as individual employee computers, out-of-use applications, CD-ROMs and backup tapes; however, access to all of these can be requested. Overlooking sources of data can lead to late production and monetary sanctions. In Phoenix Four, Inc. v. Strategic Res. Corp., 2006 WL 1409413 (S.D.N.Y. May 23, 2006), the court found that late production of information amounted to “gross negligence.” The defendant’s servers were not searched as the defendant was not aware of any information on them; however, eventually 25 gigabytes of data (equivalent of 2,500 boxes) was located on an unmapped hard drive partition such that “someone using a computer connected to that server could not ‘view’ or gain access to that section of the hard drive and would have no way of knowing of its existence.” By locating the information late in the discovery process and producing it after the deadline, the court awarded monetary sanctions against the defendants and counsel.
Additional Resources
The following links provide additional information on data maps:
While there are many commercial tools that will convert between various email formats, for NSF to PST conversion, John Randall of Randall Consulting provides the following warnings:
Subject: Lotus Notes to .pst
From: John Randall
Date: Mon Jul 28, 2008 10:58 pm
URL: http://www.litigation-support.org/viewtopic.php?t=16502You should be very careful of any migration tool that converts .NSF to .PST. Do not just assume that the tool will convert all e-mails and attachments because the program says so.
With the mjaority of migration tools in converting .PST to .NSF these are just a few of the problems.
- Possibility of bogus duplicates. Because Lotus Notes actualy contain different views of the same message. So when converting to Outlook it is quite possible there will be duplicates and lots of them.
- Converting to .PST usually increases the size of the e-mail store thus the client will be charged extra.
- “All Documents” folder does not always contain all documents. So some migration tools only use the All documents folder to try and get around the bogus duplicate problem.
- If this is not reason enough how about this one. You will most likely not get all e-mails and attachments. I could go on and on and on.
- We are dealing with electronic discovery where every e-mail. And every attachment and embedded document needs to be accounted for.
I would finally ask this question. Why do you need to convert it to a .PST? Can you process it natively?
If using a migration tool to convert .NSF files to .PST files be careful! Be very careful!
Thanks
John Randall
President
Senior Consultant/Trainer
Randall Consulting
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