These products go beyond the basic e-discovery capabilities
Read the original article by Orrin Thomas on WindowsITPro.com

E-discovery products let you search your messaging infrastructure for messages that contain specific keywords. E-discovery requirements are usually driven by a legal or compliance process. When a legal request comes in that requires the organization to provide all messages that contain a specific keyword or phrase, the e-discovery administrator is the one who needs to find all those messages and provide them to the requesting party.

In many firms, e-discovery isn’t handled by people whose primary responsibility is managing the messaging infrastructure. There’s a growing number of professionals whose expertise encompasses both the legal and messaging administration professions. This means that a good e-discovery product needs to be user-friendly and not require a deep understanding of how to construct regular expressions.
Exchange Server 2010 includes basic e-discovery functionality out of the box. To access this functionality, you use the Discovery area of the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), as Figure 1 shows. The ECP is available through a web interface.

Discovery searches in Exchange 2010 let you perform multi-mailbox searches on addresses in the To and From fields and date ranges. You can search specific mailboxes or all mailboxes in the organization, including archive mailboxes. You can use query-based criteria for selecting mailboxes, which can be helpful in organizations with tens of thousands of mailboxes. Exchange 2010 searches can use the AND, OR, and NOT operators. A user who has been delegated the Discovery Management role can use the ECP to search all message types, including email, meetings, tasks, notes, documents, journals, contacts, and IM conversations. Multi-mailbox search requires an Enterprise CAL. Another Enterprise CAL feature is litigation hold, which stops messages from being deleted directly or indirectly, even when users hard-delete them from their mailboxes.

In this review, I look at two products that you can use for e-discovery that go beyond the basic functionality offered in Exchange 2010. Those products are Sherpa Software’s Discovery Attender and Quest Software’s Archive Manager.

Discovery Attender
Discovery Attender lets you search Exchange mailboxes, including archive mailboxes, public folders, and PST files. You can also use Discovery Attender to search Microsoft Office documents, NSF files created by Lotus Notes, and PDF files stored on accessible file shares and SharePoint servers.

You can deploy Discovery Attender on a workstation or a separate server. Sherpa Software recommends that you not run it on a computer used for mission critical tasks because the search process is processor intensive. Figure 2 shows the Discovery Attender interface.

With Discovery Attender, you can create complex and refined searches. This includes the ability to use wordlists. A keyword logic tree utility lets you examine the syntactic logic of your keywords to ensure that execution occurs as intended. You can save complex or common searches as templates, which you can easily modify for new circumstances. You can also perform trial searches against known data to determine whether the search parameters will return the types of results in which you’re interested before you query your organization’s entire Exchange infrastructure.

Discovery Attender results are returned to a local store, which you can then export to PST format. This ensures that messages that were returned are still available, even if they are later hard-deleted from the Exchange messaging infrastructure. Although regular users should be unable to delete messages placed on litigation hold in a properly configured Exchange infrastructure, it might be necessary to run discovery searches against Exchange administrators who have permission to bypass this setting.

Discovery Attender is powerful, but there’s a steep learning curve when it comes to being able to fully leverage the product’s capabilities. Although e-discovery administrators can always read the documentation about all the query builder’s options, adding an IntelliSense-like capability would ensure that they’re aware of the product’s search capabilities. Discovery Attender is a comprehensive tool, but it will take most e-discovery administrators some time to be able to fully utilize all of its functionality.

Archive Manager
Archive Manager is a retention and discovery product. It captures, indexes, and stores messaging data in a repository. Messages are moved to the repository as soon as they are processed by the messaging server. This repository also serves as a message backup. You configure the repository so that your organization complies with appropriate retention requirements. You can grant access to users so that they can perform e-discovery searches against the contents of this repository. Archive Manager doesn’t have a direct litigation hold function, but end users are unable to directly modify the contents of the Archive Manager store.

E-discovery administrators use a web interface, shown in Figure 3, to access the Archive Manager repository. This interface supports the same search terms as the Exchange 2010 Discovery search but has the advantage of running that search against offline data, minimizing the impact on the messaging infrastructure. You can use the same interface to allow end users to search their mail archive. Archive Manager’s sophisticated permissions model ensures that the scope of discovery searches can be limited when necessary so that only users with appropriate permissions can perform searches against other users’ mailboxes. Archive Manager includes a PST import tool that allows you to add PST files to the existing archive. Once imported, the e-discovery administrator can search the contents of the PST file.

Archive Manager allows saved searches to be stored as RSS-compliant data, a form of updatable data to which a client can subscribe. This means that you can configure Archive Manager so that an RSS reader is able to access the output of scheduled searches and provide the e-discovery administrator with an alert if any new search results come back.

Although it’s listed as one of its features, Archive Manager isn’t primarily an e-discovery product. It’s possible to save searches, but the web interface limits the complexity of those searches. While most organizations will find this functionality adequate, the e-discovery functionality isn’t as extensive as that of Discovery Attender.

I found setting up Archive Manager fiddly. I had to check the documentation several times to get the product working correctly, and the instructional video available on Quest Software’s website is for a previous version of the product. Final installation required modifying the properties of an IIS 7.5 configuration file before everything ended up working as it should. The Archive Manager installation routine could do with a comprehensive prerequisite checker. Plus, several manual steps could be automated to simplify the deployment process.

Editors Choice
Many products in the e-discovery space primarily function as archive products because retention is closely tied with discovery. With Exchange 2010’s powerful retention functionality, many organizations are finding retention-specific products less necessary than they did with previous versions of Exchange. Discovery Attender’s pinpoint focus on discovery and its ability to search live data and PST files make it this editor’s choice. If you do purchase the product, just make sure that the e-discovery administrator takes the training so that he or she is aware of everything that the product can do.

About Sherpa Software
For over 10 years Sherpa Software has provided award-winning email management software specifically designed to address archiving, e-discovery, PST management and compliance requirements for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange environments. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sherpa’s solutions have been installed at over 2,000 worldwide organizations. Its products offer reasonable prices, easy-to-use interfaces and flexible architectures that streamline administrative processes without requiring any additional hardware or add-on components. Sherpa Software is an IBM Premier Business Partner and a Microsoft Certified Partner. For more information about Sherpa Software, visit www.sherpasoftware.com.

The Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialist (ACEDS) held their annual conference on April  2-4 at the Westin Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. This marked the second year for the event but the first that Sherpa Software participated. We wanted to provide a brief overview of the event and our perspective on this up and coming organization.

For those of you not yet familiar with ACEDS, the organization was established by The Intriago Group in 2010. It is a member organization for professionals in the private and public sectors who work in the field of e-Discovery. ACEDS is building a community of e-discovery specialists for the exchange of ideas, guidance, training and best practices and offers e-Discovery certification.

ACEDS conference focuses on an engaging, interactive format that is designed to provide attendees with current information and guidance from top experts along with networking and introduction to suppliers of products and services via the exhibit hall. Sherpa decided not to exhibit this year but instead, joined the conference for educational purposes as well as networking and evaluation of marketing opportunities. Sherpa’s very own Marta Farensbach, Product Manager of Discovery Attender, attended this year’s activities to see what it was all about.

The plethora of speakers and topics made for a very informative and entertaining couple of days. Ms. Farensbach was able to network with peers, investigate the certification process, as well as meet and discuss partnership opportunities with consultants in the discovery, forensics and corporate investigation arena. “ The panels had interesting presenters and the discussions were quite lively.” said Farensbach. “The association is new and still trying to establish an attendee base and attract vendors, but despite the limited numbers, the conference provided a nice opportunity to meet others in the e-Discovery space.”

The e-Discovery certification universe has exploded over the last year and a half and ACEDS seems to be one of the leaders in providing an organized and established presence. Sherpa will be exploring the certification process with ACEDS in the near future and we look forward to next year’s event to see how we may participate again.

For more information on Sherpa’s e-Discovery product, click here!

Many people become puzzled when responding to an e-Discovery request.  Often times, a person will begin searching and not realize that some preparations should to be made prior to doing so.  To save time (and therefore money), it is a good idea to ask the following questions as soon as you get an e-Discovery request:

• Can you narrow the scope of the search?
• How should exceptions be handled?
• How should the results be presented?
• Should the result be deduplicated?
• What format should the results be in?
• What types of reports are needed?
• Who is the key point-of-contact if anything needs to be clarified?

First, identify if you can narrow the scope of a search.  For instance, try to determine who is important in this search, what date range is relevant and what kinds of data should be targeted.  The more you can familiarize yourself with the search, the more helpful you will be to the requester.  Sometimes entire data stores need to be included, but often the scan can be limited to just specific areas.  Additionally, although email is the most common type of data store included for discovery, often files shares, SharePoint, backups and even end-users’ machines may be relevant.  If you clarify the scope ahead of time, you will save ample time skipping over unrelated data.

In an ideal world, every document in your data set will be searchable.  However, there are instances when data cannot be searched due to encryption or corruption.  For every item that cannot be searched in Discovery Attender, an exception is generated.  What should you do with these items?  With Discovery Attender, you have a variety of options to deal with exceptions.  First, you can generate a report that lists the items that threw an exception and the reasons why.  Second, you can export these items (where possible) and deliver an exception set in conjunction with the result set.  In some instances, you might even be able to ignore the exceptions.  To determine which option is best, be sure to ask the requester how he/she would like you to handle the exceptions.

Once the search is complete, you will have a result set which contains the items that meet your specified criteria.  There are many things you can do to organize and streamline your data set.  One popular option is deduplication.  Deduplication will create a single instance of each item in your result set.  For example, let’s say a message was emailed to three of the mailboxes in your search.  This will result in the same message appearing three times in your result set.  Deduplicating will leave a single instance of this item, while still keeping the links to the original three.  Deduplication will save a significant amount of time and money if the data set needs to be further reviewed.

In addition to determining whether you need to deduplicate your result set, you will also need to determine how to present the data to the e-Discovery requester.  This not only includes the file type of the export, but also the internal structure.  This can be accomplished in a variety of ways with Discovery Attender.  For instance, you can export the result set to a PST file or to flat files.  To build on this even further, you can also vary the formatting of the exported data.  For example, you can either merge your result set to a single PST file regardless of the source or you can generate a PST file per email store you searched.  You can also enforce a size limitation on the exported PST files such that it will rollover to a new one once that size has been reached.  Additionally, you can change the layout used in the internal structure of the exported PST file or change the naming convention used when exporting to flat files.

Often times, you will need to supplement the exported result set with certain reports.  Specifically, you may need to report on the search criteria, the number of hits found and so forth.  There are a variety of reporting capabilities available within Discovery Attender.  You can generate a summary report that gives a brief synopsis of the search that was performed, a duplicates report that provides a listing of each unique item and whether it had duplicates, a custom CSV report and include only specified data and much more.

As you can see, there is a lot you can do with the result set; should duplicates be eliminated, how the result set should be exported and what type of reporting should be generated are all questions that you should ask.  Make sure the e-Discovery requester knows the options available so they can provide you with accurate information.

The last thing you should determine when you receive an e-Discovery request is who the main point-of-contact is (if you should have any questions).  The majority of the time, this will be the e-Discovery requester.  However, there may be another person who will need to clarify questions about keywords, export format, search locations, or other topics regarding the search.  You should be in touch with this person throughout the e-Discovery process to help determine the best plan of attack should any further questions arise.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of questions, as there are likely many others that could be added.  Any detail you can get about the search ahead of time will help you better prepare for an e-Discovery search.  Having clear direction and good communication will make the task run much smoother, and therefore will help reduce time and stress during the e-Discovery process.

If you would like to learn more or to speak with a representative, contact Sherpa support.

Discovery Attender is primarily used by legal and IT professionals who find the application helpful in responding to requests to perform electronic discovery or investigative functions.   Over the years, however, the Sherpa support team has noticed that our end-users (especially at smaller companies) deploy Discovery Attender to perform a variety of tasks outside the legal realm.  These include:

• Eliminating PCI data:  This use is so popular it should be considered a standard task.  A variety of regulations in a number of industries forbid the storage of ‘Payment Card Industry’ data in clear text (i.e. unmasked).  Discovery Attender is deployed to find email and files which contain the rouge information such as social security and credit card numbers. It does so by recognizing PCI identification patters using the Regular Expression feature. Once found, these items are moved out of the general data stores into secure repositories using the Advanced Actions.

• Identifying inappropriate data:  Mailboxes or file stores often contain data which is inconsistent with company policy. This can range from dirty words to media files. Once items are found using keyword, size or file type criteria, the Advanced Actions clean up the data repositories and bring them back into policy compliance.

• Removing confidential documents:  Occasionally proprietary or confidential information escapes into general, non-classified data stores.  Discovery Attender comes to the rescue by finding the offending documents via file names or keywords.  These files are then deleted with extreme prejudice thus ensuring no valuable data is able to break away from secure networks.

• Collecting product history:  Some manufacturing companies use Discovery Attender to track correspondence referencing specific products or parts (via. patent numbers or part numbers) so they can keep a complete record for reference and backup purposes.

• Finding lost items: Some IT administrators are called upon to locate files or email messages that have gone astray.  A surprising number of techs have reported turning to Discovery Attender to help them find and restore lost digital items to their proper owners.

• Locating viruses:  One of the more unexpected uses reported to our support team is using Discovery Attender to supplement anti-virus software.  Definitely an off brand exercise, but several admins have found the tool very helpful to track specific infected files in static email stores and network shares that conventional virus scans may have missed.

• Collecting data after separation: Often company policy dictates that all data from employees leaving a company must be collected and stored for a defined period of time. Because Discovery Attender can scan many data stores at once (Exchange, files shares, desktops, etc.) it is the ideal tool for performing this type of collection.  As an added bonus, the deduplication features helps reduce the amount of data which needs to be kept.

• Deleting clutter:  Many organizations find themselves faced with hordes of unneeded files which pollute mail servers and file shares alike.  Spring cleaning comes around when admins break out Discovery Attender to find and remove items that muddle the data stores.  Old newsletters, cross-company emails, viral media files and all those inspirational, but large power points are eradicated.

If you have any unconventional uses for Discovery Attender, we would love to hear from you.  Please don’t hesitate to comment below, or contact us at information@sherpasoftware.com

April was officially recognized by the Association of Records Management and Administrators (ARMA) as Records & Information Management month. This year’s theme is ‘Keep it to Yourself’, a campaign to raise awareness about the sensitive nature of electronically stored information (ESI).  Executives and employees alike need to be reminded that information is one of the most vital and strategic assets that an organization possesses and securing that information is a vital task.

At Sherpa Software, we regularly work with records administrators who need tools that help them identify, monitor and secure information being stored or transmitted via email. If your organization is considering implementing a records management strategy here are some ways that Sherpa’s products can serve as a part of your enforcement strategy:

• Mail Attender is an excellent tool for applying a retention policy to delete old email content. The flexible rules architecture allows you to select messages based on a variety of criteria and either delete them directly or relocate them into a ‘to be deleted’ folder where users have an opportunity to perform a final audit before the deletion occurs.
• PST Backup Attender is a lightweight desktop service that can be deployed through Group Policies to scan desktop machines for PST file content and apply retention policies to delete old messages from the PST file. This is an ideal solution for customers who have a large number of widely dispersed computers to manage.
• Need to assess the volume of ESI in your environment in order to plan a retention strategy? Try either Discovery Attender or Report Attender . Either of these products can help you identify the volume, type, size and location of many types of ESI data.

If you are a records management administrator please stay tuned to our website. Sherpa is currently working on a new product that will help you enforce a retention cycle for ESI data store in a variety of sources outside of email.

For more information or to download a free trial version, email information@sherpasoftware.com or click here!

The ability to locate PST files and import them into Exchange mailboxes has long been a favorite feature within Sherpa’s Mail Attender for Exchange. With the most recent update to Mail Attender 4.7 SP1, we’ve added the ability to deduplicate (or single instance) PST files during the import process. This is a great new addition to Mail Attender’s already powerful toolbox. The attached video is an updated version of one of our more popular instructional presentations, with updated screen shots and a brief description of how the deduplication process works. If importing PST files into Exchange is something that interests you, be sure to check it out! In addition to the new deduplication feature, this video describes how Mail Attender identifies PST files and automatically determines their proper ownership before importing them into the respective mailboxes.

View the video here:

For more information or to speak with a representative, contact Sherpa support!

Introduction

Today, we want to show you how to set-up journaling on your IBM Lotus Domino server. For this article, we will assume that you either are a Domino Administrator or are familiar, to some extent, with Domino server administration.

Overview

What is journaling and why would you want to do it?

Journaling is a facility for systematically capturing and storing a copy of each email message that arrives at the Domino server. You can think of it like having an automatic blind copy on these messages.

Domino includes journaling as a built-in feature under your current license. You can apply journaling either to all messages or to just a subset.

The primary advantage of journaling over archiving from mail files or restoring from tape backup is that journaling is not dependant on user activity. Even if a user did not save the message they sent or deleted the one they received, the journal will have a copy for later e-discovery.

You may also hear journaling sometimes referred to as “Compliance Archiving” in other contexts.

The reasons for journaling mail are varied, but often involve:

• Litigation—The need to comply with a court order to turn over electronically stored information (ESI) relevent to a law suit. Many organizations have learned the hard way that simply relying on employees to not delete messages is not a satisfactory solution.
• Regulation—Government or industry regulations may require secure storage of ESI, including email, for specified periods.
• Open Records/Freedom of Information—On the other side of that coin, local, state, and federal governments may be required to present ESI to constituents who ask for it.
• Internal Investigation—Monitoring email as a matter of course or in response to complaints from employees may be part of your organization’s policy.

Your needs may include some of these or may be different. In any case, how do we set this up in Domino?

The Form

All your configuration changes will take place on the Server Configuration document, which is accessible from the Domino Directory (names.nsf) using either the Notes client or, more properly, the Domino Administrator client. You will need to edit some fields on two tabs under “Router/SMTP”:

Router/SMTP —> Restrictions and Controls… —> Rules

This is where you define what messages will be journaled (the messages that you care about). Often this is simply all messages. However, Domino offers some selection flexibility if you don’t need to capture all messages. We tell Domino what messages we are interested in by setting up a “Mail Rule.”

For those that need journaling enabled, you will need to repeat the creation of these Mail Rules on each Server Configuration document that is used by the servers. You can simplify this by using a Server Configuration that targets servers by a group rather than by individual server names. The Domino Administrator help explains Server Configuration documents in detail.

Router/SMTP —> Advanced… —> Journaling

Above is a graphic detailing where you tell Domino what to do with the messages it has captured with the Mail Rule, above. At a high level, you have two choices for a journal location: Local (that is, local to the server that captured the message) or Remote (a mail-accessible destination, which could be on another server.) Here are some of the differences:

Local Database

• Each server maintains its own collection of journals.
• Journals are managed (i.e., rolled over) based on size or time, as you define.
• Journals grow and accumulate on the mail server, which is encumbered with their house-keeping.
• Messages are encrypted, which will complicate later e-discovery.

Mail-in Database

• Multiple servers can contribute to a central journal.
• Journals can be Notes mail-in databases, but could be third-party repositories or even cloud services.
• Journals are not managed by Domino.
• Messages are not encrypted, making e-discovery easier.
• The mail server is relieved of storing and maintaing the journals, but the message’s journal copy will need to be routed.

The Mail Router

Once the changes have been made to the Server Configuration, the mail router task on that server will need to be restarted. The console command, restart task router, will do that. Once that is done, as messages arrive that match the Mail Rule, Domino will take care of copying them to your new journal.

Any journaling solution you implement will increase the amount of storage space you will need. Be sure to calculate this into your journaling plans. Also, since journaling encumbers the server with extra work, you may want to read information, like the Lotus Notes and Domino wiki before jumping in with both feet.

Summary

Whether your needs to journal are externally directed or motivated internally, Domino’s built-in journaling function is a cost-affective, entry-level way to comply with the need to capture email as part of an over-all ESI management policy.

Stay-tuned for the video demonstration of how to do set up Domino journaling! But for now, contact Sherpa support to learn more!

Within the past two years, we have heard a few customers asking about ‘Cloud’ solutions for their mail archives, graveyards and journals. This was not a feature that we offered, however, Sherpa is very happy to report, that this has now changed! Sherpa now has the ability to archive, graveyard and/or journal messages to the cloud!

As I’m sure you know, the cloud offers customers the ability to store data off-site and to be compliant with their email retention policies. Moving the data off-site would allow companies to keep their in-house servers running efficiently, yet not sacrificing storage, backup time, etc. by having the data on premises. That means that the cliché isn’t true. You CAN have your cake and eat it too!

So how does it work – quite simply actually. The necessary steps would be to have our products installed on the in-house Domino servers (as they have always been). However, within Compliance Attender (for graveyards and journals) and Mail Attender (for archived mail), you would simply configure the products to use the designated cloud servers as the destination for the databases.

Here are the few steps needed to get your cloud storage ready for our products:

1. Pick a cloud vendor

Sherpa has a few recommended vendors with an extensive IBM Domino and Lotus Notes background. This is crucial to a customer because they can feel secure about who was handling their data. They are also partners who have been working with Sherpa Software for years and they understand, install and use our products. However, if you already have a cloud vendor, we’re confident that we could provide some simple advice to the you and/or the vendor to get this process ready.

2. Decide how you want to leverage the cloud

There are basically two choices:

a. Install Domino on the cloud server.

This requires each user to register a new server and then install Domino on the cloud server, using the server id. Once that has been done, it would need updated to the Server document to ensure that the proper rights were given and then create a connection document, so that the in-house Domino servers know how to connect to the Domino cloud server.

b. Use the cloud storage as an extension of your current Domino data structure.

Using a Domino folder link (mapped drive), make the cloud storage be an extension of your Domino server.

3. Configure Sherpa’s products to use the cloud servers.

Because of the way Sherpa’s products are built, the solution is a backward compatible to any release of Mail and Compliance Attender. Customers can take advantage with no upgrades to their current installation. The only changes would be to specify the cloud server as the destination for the databases.

For those of you who have our Discovery Attender product, all of the cloud data will be searchable because the data is still stored within a Domino database. None of that changes. All that is happening is that the Domino databases that our products create and populate are now in the cloud, instead of on premises.

We built a cost effective way for customers to take advantage of this at very little cost associated to them. We offer both a managed solution as well as a self managed option to keep the costs down and the control in the hands of the users. Both of these factors help differentiate our offerings from others.

To find out more information about this new offering, please contact your Sales Representative today.

In Discovery Attender 8.1.25, a new architecture for the Discovery Attender Results database was introduced. This architectural change provided Sherpa’s development team with the ability to leverage many new ideas which are becoming a reality within Discovery Attender 8.1.28. Scheduled for release on May 21^st, included within this new version will be quite a few additional features within the Results and also some changes within Discovery Attender itself. Let’s continue with an inside look at the Results database.

If ‘Content’ is used as the ‘Search type’ and either ‘Any of the words’ or ‘All of the words’ is selected as the ‘Search method’, the keywords used within the search can now be automatically highlighted within the Results. This means that when any Results document is opened, an end-user will automatically see all of the ‘hits’ for the keywords that were provided. No longer will you have to perform your own search to find these keywords! Not only that, but you also have the ability to specify what color you want to use when highlighting. The choices are yellow, pink or blue. Please keep in mind that all keyword hits are visible within fields on the document that do not normally display with the form. This is done using the ‘Message information’ button within the Results. Below is a screen shot of a Results document that was found by searching for the words “acme” and “merger”.

In this example, the highlighted values show the occurrences of the search syntax in yellow.

Regardless of how or what was searched, the end-user will be able to redact the results. This will ensure that any keywords, phrases, etc. that are included within the results but are deemed to be ‘internal’ only should not be visible if the results are shared with outside/opposing counsel. For instance, pretend the following phrase was within a Result:

“Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.”

But neither the person’s name nor the comparison is pertinent to the case and should not be shared with anyone, thus the value of ‘Mary’ and ‘white as snow’ should be redacted. Here’s how it would look:

“█████ had a little lamb, whose fleece was █████.”

During the redaction process, the specified keywords/phrases were replaced with the redaction value. This simulates someone using a black magic marker to obscure text on a printed page. Notice that though ‘Mary’ and ‘white as snow’ are of different lengths, but both are redacted using the same redaction value. This will make it more difficult for anyone seeing the redacted values to be able to guess what was there prior to the redaction.

The redaction process can be achieved in one of two ways:

a. A list of keywords/phrases are specified and all occurrences are redacted within the selected Results.

b. A redaction value is selected within a Result.

Regardless of the method used, a complete audit trail of all redaction activity will be kept for historical purposes.

Another feature that has been added is also available when ‘Content’ is used as the ‘Search type’ and either ‘Any of the words’ or ‘All of the words’ is selected as the ‘Search method’. Within the Discovery Attender Results, a view will contain all Results categorized by the search terms that are within each Result. This means that this view can be opened and is easily determine how many Results were found per each search term. For instance, if the search found all messages that contain either ‘ACME’ or ‘merger’, within this view you will be able to see how many Results contained ‘ACME’ and how many Results contained ‘merger’. This will provide feedback on the viability of the search terms used. In the screen shot below, you will see that both “acme” and “merger” were found within four Results.

When searching, you have the option of ‘Exclude drafts’. This is an interesting scenario. Is a ‘draft’ (since it was not sent), discoverable in any way? If you ask that question, some experts will say “No” and others will say “Yes.” The new features in Discovery Attender for Notes will allow an organization to decide (with the ‘Exclude drafts’ option) and also allow them to easily see what messages are drafts. Now this is where we need to answer “What is a draft?” Most people would say that it is a message that has been created, but has yet to be sent. We agree with that, but also include other types of mail documents that have been created, but never sent. This would include Tasks, Appointments, All Day Events, Reminders, etc. So, how does it work? Well, within the Results, a menu option named ‘Drafts’ (aren’t we imaginative?) has been added that will show all mail documents that have been created, but never sent. This will allow an organization to search the drafts and then isolate them, so that you can determine if they are on point as a Result.

For those who don’t already know this, Discovery Attender’s sister product, Mail Attender, has the ability to archive messages out of active mail files, leaving a ‘stub’ behind to allow the users to easily locate/open the correlating archived message. Within the ‘Server Definition’, there is an option to ‘Exclude stubbed messages’. Sherpa Software decided to expand this functionality. If a mail file is searched and a keyword is found within the message, but the message has been stubbed by Mail Attender, instead of copying the stubbed message to the results. The archived message is located and copied to the Results, in place of the stubbed message. This will allow the entire message to be seen, as though the archive process never occurred.

Some other common questions include:

“Now that I have my Results, how can I export them and what formats are available?”

The newest developments have made big strides in accommodating a company’s needs. So what does this mean? This means there will now be three, yes three, different formats to export the Results including:

1. The first format is into a Domino database. This will allow you to create an export that either contains a full set or a subset of the Results.
2. The second format is to create an XML file for every selected result. This will allow you to transport the Results into any other data store that can ingest the XML produced natively by Domino.
3. The third format is to create an EML file for every selected result. This will make every result viewable by most browsers.

Regardless of the export format that is specified, you will be able to create a .zip file of the exports. Let’s say 100 Results are selected to be exported as either EML or XML formats. The export will generate 100 separate files (within the folder structure you specify), but a .zip file can also be created within the same location, that contains all 100 files.

This comes in handy when the ‘Send me the exported results’ option is selected during the export. Now only one file will be within the message sent to you, instead of 100 (as in this example).

Though most searches are being performed by Domino-centric people (Administrators, etc.), Sherpa is aware that other users also may need to use Discovery Attender to search data. With that said, we are changing the ‘Search’ form, so that it is more user-friendly and is easily completed by someone who is not Domino-centric. In order to help this, we are allowing the Domino administrators to create ‘User Profiles’ that define some defaults for the users, so that the users will not have to contend with options that are not applicable to their environment. This will make the Search form much easier to use. We have also gathered information, that most companies only search mail stores (active mail files, archives, journals, etc.). Additionally, we are also making the Search form more mail-centric, without removing the ability to search Domino applications and loose files (network and/or client).

Lastly, Discovery Attender will be first Domino product to undergo a new UI motif. The colors and graphics within the product will be changed to give the product a new and improved look! Though these changes do not affect functionality, they should produce a more pleasant look and feel to the product. Below are screen shots of the Search form and the menu system:

 For questions or to learn more, contact Sherpa support!

Report Attender Mines an Organization’s Most Valuable Electronically Stored Information: Answering Critical Questions about Content, Size, Age and Importance.

PITTSBURGH, PA – May 8, 2012 – Sherpa Software, a leading provider of e-Discovery and information management solutions, today announced the availability of Report Attender, a new data analysis tool designed to help IT, litigation, compliance and internal security professionals.  Report Attender quickly analyzes the content of key data stores, with an automated scanning engine that saves time and effort.  Report Attender enables IT, compliance managers and corporate counsel to make informed decisions when investigating the content of data stores and e-Discovery collections. This stand alone application can identify items cluttering the network and also provide information in the early case assessment phase of litigation. This is an easy and effective way for organizations to make informed decisions on whether or not to proceed to a lengthier and more expensive e-Discovery process.

“We are committed to helping companies reduce the financial impact of litigation with e-discovery and early case assessment tools that deliver the necessary information for important business decisions,” said Kevin Ogrodnik, President of Sherpa Software.  “We are proud to offer this new solution to complement our existing product offerings – and improve outcomes for organizations desiring a cost-effective approach to litigation support without sacrificing functionality or effectiveness.”

Processing data can be a tedious, costly, and excruciating chore.  Report Attender simplifies data analysis with an automated scanning engine that gathers key statistics and categorizes files and messages from network shares and email stores.  Installed locally, the application scans file shares and email stores to gather information about the items cluttering corporate networks and email servers.  Once scans are complete, users can drill down through summary reports, expansive charts, tables and graphs that supply visual representations of crucial information.

“Customers in areas such as compliance, litigation support and IT administration have told us they need a faster and more cost-effective way to find out what’s in their data,” said Marta Farensbach, product manager, Sherpa Software.  “We developed Report Attender to make data analysis easy.  Users can get breakdowns on details such as date range, file type, and size.  They can find out who the custodians are, and then determine what areas need to be investigated further.”

Report Attender offers a practical, user-friendly interface with an intuitive wizard to create custom scans, with options for accessing Windows file shares and email stores.  Analysis views in Report Attender include snapshots by type, size, dates, and data stores.  Other views show breakdowns that identify duplicates using quantity, size and percent statistics to uncover redundant data.

Available today, Sherpa Software’s Report Attender  includes the ability to scan any Windows accessible file share, as well as collect statistics on messages and attachments stored in PST files, Exchange mailboxes and online archives.  To learn more about Report Attender and other Sherpa Software products, please visit www.sherpasoftware.com.

About Sherpa Software

For over 10 years Sherpa Software has provided IT Professionals with award-winning information management software specifically designed to address email management, archiving, e-discovery, PST management and compliance requirements for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange environments. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sherpa’s solutions are practical, reliable and affordable and have been installed at thousands of organizations worldwide. Sherpa Software’s products offer flexible architectures that streamline administrative processes without requiring any additional hardware or add-on components. Sherpa Software is an IBM Premier Business Partner and a Microsoft Certified Partner.  For more information about Sherpa Software, visit www.sherpasoftware.com.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.