Press Release
SOPHISTICATED SOFTWARE IS NOW AVAILABLE THAT MITIGATES THE MISUSE OF FINANCIAL AND SENSITIVE INFORMATION
Pittsburgh, PA,August 2002 - As acts of corporate financial misconduct continue to infiltrate many highly respected organizations, Sherpa fittingly announces its messaging solutions, which provide management the capability to search, retrieve, save and purge sensitive information. Corporate email now poses unprecedented risks to all companies regardless of industry or size, which makes it essential that they take control over their email and database content.The SEC, NRC and other regulatory organizations have begun auditing corporations mandating compliance to strict standards and regulations of company sensitive information. Sherpa products help protect organizations from severe damage that can be caused by mismanaged content in their corporate email system. These unique utilities safeguard the value of companies, and prevent the destruction of corporate public image.
"There has never been a more critical time for management to begin actively controlling and regulating information residing in their corporate messaging and database systems,” said J.S. Ogrodnik, Chief Executive Officer of Sherpa Software. “The power of sensitive information and the influence it has on legal proceedings has become the key element with each incident of deception that is exposed in this country. Being proactive in managing your company’s documents is critical to its ongoing viability."
Mail Attender, the leading email content management tool in the market today, administers many of the Fortune 1000’s information. The product’s key functionality and benefits eliminates inappropriate business material and attachments, searches for and reports findings of words or phrases that could be used legally, enforces document retention policies, and deletes pornographic and company-sensitive content. Through these features, Mail Attender enables organizations to control the growth of their email system, reduce legal liability, control electronic sabotage, and increase the company’s return on investment.
Today, Mail Attender is being used by an energy corporation is currently using the product to find and analyze critical information to be used in legal proceedings. A company in the insurance industry uses Mail Attender for key word searches in order to avoid legal exposure. A biopharmaceutical organization’s legal team relies on Mail Attender to collect both essential business and non-business related material for review. To preserve documents that will be used in a legal case, a car manufacturer is using the product to lock selected documents from being edited or deleted. Numerous banking institutions have implemented Mail Attender for document retention policies. Any company in every industry has the ability to implement Mail Attender to specifically fit their needs. Please see attached information for specific examples of how email affects corporate liability.
Sherpa offers additional email and database content management tools compatible with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.
PST Attender provides a complete Exchange/Outlook management solution over the content, storage and legal risks of their employees email. PST Attender is similar in functionality and overall benefit to its sister software Mail Attender, but has unique focus on Outlook .pst files, otherwise known as Personal Storage Folders. Whether your need is to audit content, enforce policy, regain overused storage space, or reduce potential legal risks. PST Attender provides your IT personnel the tools to manage these issues and much more.
Database Attender is a multifaceted tool that provides centralized database administration, content management, security and resource usage management. Scan database content for legally sensitive or business inappropriate material. Detect potential security breaches within both database Access Control Lists and individual Notes documents. Set standards for new application deployment, detect design flaws and monitor database growth and usage. Database Attender even extends relational database capability into the Notes environment with a unique data synchronization feature! More than merely an administration and data integration tool, Database Attender is an enterprise-wide “smoke detector” to help organizations detect and extinguish potential problems within their Notes infrastructure.
Directory Attender manages the most important databases within your Domino environment, the Domino Directories. If the content of your directories is compromised, the implications could be infrastructure issues, security issues or both. Neither one is a good scenario. Directory Attender provides automated management for your Domino directories, allowing the administrators to enforce the content of the directory data, as well as monitoring exception conditions. In addition, Directory Attender provides the administrators with numerous views detailing the exception conditions that were either resolved or monitored. This data can prove to be invaluable to your administrators! Directory Attender will be a beneficial addition to your Domino administrative tools.
Sherpa Software Group LP is a privately held company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with a worldwide distribution channel. Sherpa designs and develops groupware utility software as shrink-wrap products targeted to provide functionality that is not inherent within Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.
For more information about our solutions, please contact Marcia Medve or Theresa Zajacs at 412-206-0005, or visit www.sherpasoftware.com.
Lotus Notes is a trademark or registered trademark of Lotus Development Corporation. Microsoft and Microsoft Exchange are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
Email-related Corporate Liabilities (courtesy of Omniva Policy Systems) If anything will bring about the downfall of a company…it is the blind copies of emails that should never have been sent in the first place… - Michael Eisner (Forbes, May 2000)
Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner is not alone in his concern about uncontrolled email. Companies across a broad range of industries have been confronted with the risks of email. This is principally because email is easy to distribute and nearly impossible to erase. For every message sent, multiple copies are automatically created and saved in locations over which you have no control. The result – company email archives are becoming a prime target in corporate litigation. Liabilities aside, just complying with email discovery requests can cost millions of dollars.
Case #1
American Home Products had to produce electronic archives that included 33 million emails. They paid $3.7 billion in legal damages as a result of information discovered.
Case #2
Soon after 3Com acquired U.S. Robotics, a shareholder suit was filed claiming that top executives had dumped stocks while hiding large losses in the newly acquired subsidiary. Following a subpoena of its email archives, 3Com elected to pay $260 million to settle the case.
Case #3
Microsoft has spent an enormous amount of time and money defending a federal anti-trust suit based in no small part on several notorious emails.
Case #4
A series of email messages leaked to the press showed that Bridgestone Firestone was aware of its tire safety issues well before they initiated a recall. The result: a deluge of bad press and questioning by lawmakers.
Case #5
Dow Chemical has fired 74 employees and disciplined at least 435 employees following investigations into the inappropriate use of email.
Case #6
The New York Times had an email retention policy but no tool for enforcement, so the policy was generally ignored. In an effort to shield itself from liability, the Times fired more than 20 staffers for violating its policy.
For Immediate Release
Contact: Cathy Capizzi
(412) 206-0005 x207
ccapizzi@sherpasoftware.com