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Sherpa’s Next Generation

by Rick Wilson on January 9, 2012

There is something about launching into a new year that resonates with almost everyone. Maybe it’s just the promise of a fresh start full of limitless possibilities that intrigues us – either way, it is undeniably exciting! We don’t normally have that same opportunity to enjoy an annual fresh start in our work environment but, in a rare turn of events, that is exactly what Sherpa’s Exchange team has available to us as we enter 2012.

I mentioned in my last post that we’ve been discussing a new policy enforcement product. The good news is that the project has been green-lighted by our management team and the groundwork is underway. The idea behind this effort is to leverage Sherpa’s expertise in policy management and develop a new product incorporating this core set of design goals:

  • Address recurring feature requests from our customer base
  • Support a wide variety of content sources (beyond email)
  • Offer flexible deployment scenarios
  • Powered by a much more flexible policy enforcement engine

With those goals in mind, I’ve been working with our senior architects to document a baseline feature set for the product and then map that feature set to a product architecture.

This post is important to you for two specific reasons. First, to let Mail Attender customers know that work is underway on a greatly improved tool that will be available to all of our current software maintenance customers when it is released. Second, this is a great time to submit any ideas for features that would improve your experience with our products. Many of you routinely offer these types of suggestions to our support team, but I wanted to make sure all of our readers know that this would be a good time to pass along their ideas.  If you would like to contribute, please feel free to email me directly, rwilson@sherpasoftware.com.  I’m looking forward to 2012 and the prospect of a brand new Sherpa product to share with all of you.

Off the Topic: 5 Unique New Year’s Traditions from Around the World

by Ned Bacheson on January 9, 2012

How do you celebrate New Year’s?  If I had to take a guess, you probably celebrate New Year’s surrounded by family and friends, enjoying drinks of your choice (probably wine and champagne) and watching the ball drop with Dick Clark (and now Ryan Seacrest). If you’re particularly lucky, perhaps you share a kiss with that special someone when the clock hits 12:00am. Have you ever imagined how New Year’s would look in another country?  Listed below are five of the top ten “Unique New Year Traditions from Around the World.”

1) Breaking Dishes On Neighbor’s Door  – Denmark

A strange and weird Danish New Year tradition, depending on how you look at it, is throwing dishes at neighbor’s door. Strangely, this makes them happy instead of annoying them. The family with the tallest tower of broken plates, glasses, cups and other crockery is considered to be the luckiest person because it symbolizes their large amount of loyal friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) Talking to Spirits – Mexico

Talking to spirits is a part of Mexican belief. Mexicans strongly believe that they can communicate with the souls of their dead loved ones. New Year’s Eve is considered the best time to communicate with dead spirits to convey a message or ask for guidance. And this is not done at home on an individual basis but is a legal Mexican practice.  Taos Inn, in New Mexico for example, offers 15 minutes session of spiritualism and meditation for $15. Not a bad price for some helpful guidance!


 

 


 

 

 

 

3) Wearing Polka Dots – Philippines

Imagine streets full of people wearing polka dots and dining room tables full of round shaped food and fruits on one single day of the year. This all actually happens in the Philippines on New Year’s Eve every year. Philippines believe that this will bring them prosperity by associating the round dots to coins and wealth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4) Burning Scarecrow Dummy – Ecuador

Ecuador has a unique custom of crafting scarecrows and then burning them at midnight. They adorn them and fill the scarecrows with newspapers and pieces of wood. As midnight approaches, everyone gathers outside their home and each family burns their own scarecrow. The tradition says that this destroys all the bad things that took place in the past 12 months. The scarecrow also scares away bad luck, which in turn, fills their new year with luck and happiness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5) Mistletoe Leaves Are Placed Under Pillow to Find Husband – Ireland

The single women of Ireland wait desperately for New Year’s Eve because it is the night that can bring them the love of their lives. They place mistletoe leaves under their pillow hoping to catch their future husband. It is also believed in the Irish culture that this act will help them get rid of bad luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world is a large and very different place.  Yes, people of all nations may celebrate New Year’s much differently around the world, with different traditions, but there are a lot of general themes to be seen.  We all want to start a new, fresh year with renewed enthusiasm and hope no matter what happened during the past year.  We all want to be happier, find love, renew friendships,  increase our wealth and also hope for a little extra luck in the coming new year.  I (and we at Sherpa) hope everyone has an enjoyable holiday season, a great New Year’s and beyond!  We wish you all the best of luck with all your endeavors in the coming year!

 

References

1) http://www.smashinglists.com/weird-ne

Tips on Exchange 2010 Migration

by Shoshana Mahler on January 9, 2012

As more of our customers migrate to Exchange 2010, we continue to learn about the many hurdles they need to overcome.  If your organization is considering a migration to Exchange 2010, you may want to keep the following tips in mind.

First, Exchange 2010 does not allow you to directly access the mailbox servers by default; instead, you are required to go through the Client Access Server (CAS).   This feature was initially introduced in Exchange 2007, but has been revamped in Exchange 2010.  Unlike Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010 moves the mailbox (MAPI) and directory access connections from the backend mailbox servers to the CAS servers in the middle tier.  In other words, when you open an Exchange 2010 mailbox, the CAS server accepts the connections, which then passes it along to Active Directory and the mailbox servers.  As a result, if you have any third party software that needs to connect to Exchange 2010, you will likely need to configure it to go through your CAS servers.

Second, when performing the migration, try using the PowerShell instead of the Exchange Management Console (EMC).  We have seen several organizations that have used the EMC and have experienced issues.  For example:

  • When migrating users to Exchange 2010 using the EMC, certain objects in AD are either not updated or not set correctly.  For instance, we have worked with several organizations where the legacyExchangeDN was either blank or listed the wrong Exchange server.  We also have seen the msExchangeHomeServerName listing the wrong server.
  • When setting permissions using the EMC, it does not fully rollout to AD, or the permissions get revoked once logged off the Exchange server.  This becomes evident if you try to test these permissions using Outlook.

This is not to say that you cannot use the EMC, nor is this meant to imply that other organizations will have the same issues.  It may, however, save you time and frustration if you use the PowerShell command and avoid using the EMC altogether.

Third, client throttling policies are enabled by default in Exchange 2010 SP1 and SP2, which can have a negative impact on any third party software used to help administer your Exchange server.  Client throttling is used to track and restrict the bandwidth each Exchange user consumes.  As a result, the accounts used by your third party software to help administer your Exchange server will be limited as well.  To overcome this issue, you can create a client throttling policy that has no restrictions and then assign these accounts to that policy.

Finally, the majority of organizations who migrate to Exchange 2010 do so because they feel this will eliminate their need for third party software, but there are limitations within Exchange 2010 that you may not realize.  For example, the retention policies available in Exchange 2010 through the Messaging Records Management (MRM) feature has some major limitations, such as:

  • You cannot create a different retention policy based on the primary mailbox versus the online archive.  That is, if you would like a retention policy to delete items in the Inbox, it will be deleted from both the primary mailbox’s Inbox and the online archive’s Inbox.
  • You are limited in the amount of criteria that you can specify to target the messages you want to delete and/or retain.  If you want to delete messages based on its size, sender or criteria other than age, you cannot use the MRM.

Other issues may arise when migrating to Exchange 2010; this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. There are many great new features in Exchange 2010 making an upgrade very appealing; it is imperative however, when doing any migration, to properly research and test your desired configuration.

To learn more about Sherpa Software’s solutions, go to www.sherpasoftware.com

Mail Attender: A Complimentary Tool for Discovery Attender

by Ned Bacheson on December 29, 2011

Although Sherpa offers a variety of tools to assist with your Microsoft Exchange environment, you may not know that these individual products actually complement each other in many ways.  If you are a Discovery Attender for Exchange customer, did you know that Sherpa’s Mail Attender for Exchange product is a great addition to your e-Discovery needs and can help you do many things that complement Discovery Attender?  Together, these products can help improve your e-Discovery process and effectively manage data.  If you currently utilize Discovery Attender to search all of the PST files in your environment, Mail Attender can help you extend your search to PST content that resides on user desktops, therefore, improving the odds of uncovering relevant search results.

More specifically, how do these two products work together? To give you a little background, Discovery Attender is a software tool designed to automate the search and collection of electronically stored information (ESI) across a variety of sources (mailboxes, network file shares, SharePoint documents, etc.).

When you receive an e-Discovery request, it is common to be given loose PST files to search (in addition to live mailboxes).  Once you have finished the search, these PST files remain and, over time, can occupy a significant amount of valuable storage space.  Your IT or legal staff may only be permitted to delete content within these PST files that is of a certain age, and this is exactly where Mail Attender fits into the equation.

Mail Attender can help you better manage PST’s during and after litigation by applying flexible mail rules.  These rules provide over seventy different types of selection criteria to target specific messages and then a wide variety of actions (including copy, move, delete or report) to manage those messages.  Mail rules can be applied to a wide variety of email content including mailboxes, network-based PST files, desktop-based PST files, Online Archives and/or Public Folders.

How are Sherpa customers using both products exactly?  Here are a few examples of how our Discovery Attender customers are using Mail Attender to aid their e-Discovery needs:

  1. Managing the content in these PST files, such as automatically deleting content that is out-of-date (i.e. past the date of your organization’s retention policy)
  2. Searching for content located in desktop-based PST files
  3. Locating and moving desktop-based PST files to a network share so Discovery Attender can access them for searches
  4. Helping to supplement their searches.  For example, examining certain MAPI properties (i.e. is a calendar item recurring or not) and then reporting on those items, or exporting them.  This is a great time saver for customers who must manually identify these items now.

Combining Sherpa products can help you build a more comprehensive e-Discovery process.  This is especially true with our Mail Attender and Discovery Attender products.  Discovery Attender allows you to perform comprehensive e-Discovery searches and provides you with great review capabilities.  Mail Attender can then be used to take action on the search results or further the reach of your search to content residing on user desktops.  If you are a Discovery Attender customer, you may want to consider utilizing Mail Attender for Exchange to aid your e-Discovery needs!

For more information or to speak with a Sherpa representative, go to www.sherpasoftware.com.

Customer Product Reviews

by Ned Bacheson on December 20, 2011

Sherpa Software recently attended the 2011 Fall Connections Trade Show. Throughout our time at the show, we met with a lot of customers and received numerous Product Reviews. Please view some of the ones we collected during the show below!

Maury Gilman of Apotex, an independent pharmaceutical company, utilizes Discovery Attender for Exchange for all of their litigation searches. He was very satisfied with the large drop in cost from a competitive product to now his use of Discovery Attender.

Steve Krems of 02 Micro has been utilizing Discovery Attender for Exchange for over 5 years and also recently purchased Archive Attender. Steve said he recommends both products.

 

Carl Anderson of Holland & Knight utilizes Mail Attender to move emails to subfolders to increase Outlook performance and Discovery Attender for searching multiple items like PST’s and archives.

 

Greg Misenar of Wright Runstad & Co. utilizes Mail Attender for Exchange to run statistics on his company’s mailboxes and also to set specific rules on their mailboxes and folders. Because they have thousands of users (and messages) they needed a product that could help them better manage these tasks. Mail Attender was a perfect fit.

 

More reviews available at www.youtube.com/sherpasoftware

The FRCP & E-Discovery Software

by admin on November 10, 2011

The FRCP, E-Discovery & Your Business

While the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) may seem complicated, there is one point it makes with absolute clarity: businesses should have an enforced e-discovery and data retention policy. While this intimidating piece of literature spells out the expansive rules governing discovery and data retention for all organizations, it also gives allowances for information lost due to routine data retention policies. These exceptions, however, apply exclusively to those who already have a documented data retention and e-discovery software system.

The FRCP predates the advent of computers in business. It wasn’t until 2006 that discovery requests automatically included all applicable electronic files. As such, electronic data is now subject to the FRCP.

FRCP chapter 5, specifically rules 26 through 37, cover the bulk of the discovery law. Rule 26a eliminates previous terminology confusion by adding “electronically stored information” or ESI as its own category. This prevents arguments over whether voice over IP, instant messages, PDAs and databases are included in discovery requests. Thus, ESI is governed by the same FRCP rules as paper documents.

What’s even more confusing is that various laws intersect to determine which ESI requires archiving and which can be trashed. This means that laws such as HIPPA, the NASD or the SEC dictate how long specific information, even information sent via email or IM, must be stored. In addition to retaining ESI according to federal regulations, companies must be able to effectively and efficiently search these archives and procure requested documents within the specified timeframe.

Having an intuitive and easy to use e-discovery and data retention discovery program is important for storing, sorting, indexing, and retrieving files according to the retention laws that apply to your company. Additionally, there is the problem of determining how to archive data that is not strictly regulated. It’s improbable, though not impossible, that email invitations to work lunches and such will be needed for litigious purposes. Do you archive them anyway? If so, for how long? And should you happen to delete a necessary email days before a discovery request, will that look suspicious and count against you in court?

If your company has a fine-tuned system in place, your chances of being held accountable for missing information is lowered considerably. A “safe harbor” provision was added to the FRCP to prevent companies attempting to be compliant from getting bulldozed in a court case. Simply put, this safe harbor provision prevents the court from penalizing companies for being unable to produce requested information that was “lost as a result of routine, good faith operation of an electronic information system”.

This does not give companies carte blanche freedom to routinely delete regulated ESI, but does provide companies freedom to routinely delete ESI of low importance without fear of repercussions. Similarly, provisions exist to prevent companies from experiencing “undue burden” when attempting to comply with an e-discovery request. Without an existing e-discovery program in place, determining what constitutes an “undue burden” for your company can take longer than the allotted period for the discovery request.

Sanctions taken by the court against companies who cannot or will not comply with a discovery request can be quite severe and range from covering the opponent’s legal fees to allowing the court to find judgment by default. Having a thoughtfully planned archival and e-discovery system in place is the best way to prevent legal sanctions resulting from a failure to comply with discovery requests.

Sherpa Software offers a broad range of email archival software, e-discovery software, and compliance software that integrates seamlessly with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange to keep you prepared to tackle any litigation that may come your way.

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