E-Mail Archiving Vendors Upgrade E-Discovery Capabilities

Two e-mail archiving vendors bolstered the e-discovery functionality of their flagship products, moves designed to help organizations with changing discovery rules and the staggering growth of corporate electronic data.

EVault, of Emeryville, Calif., introduced EVault Insight, an e-discovery solution that provides a two-pronged approach to managing electronic documents and e-mail for regulatory compliance.

EVault Insights Online Review Service is a hosted document repository and review service that allows review teams to manage millions of documents from a secure Web site.

Features include a simple search engine, native electronic document review, an unlimited number of folders and attributes to organize documents, customizable access levels, and several production options to export responsive documents in the companys preferred format.

A second service is the Electronic File Conversion Service, which converts documents to either TIF or PDF, which allows them to be uploaded into litigation management systems more easily.

This service allows conversion of a variety of media types, extraction of all meta fields, treatment of files with no file extensions, keyword searches in text and metadata, data filtering, and text extraction at the document level.

Meanwhile, e-mail archiving vendor Fortiva has upgraded its Archiving Suite with a variety of e-discovery features.

The new offline tiered storage option allows organizations to store older data offline while remaining fully indexed and searchable for discovery purposes.

A new Legal Hold feature allows organizations to create separate repository for each subject or case and assign messages to the repository so copies of e-mail messages will be retained indefinitely.

This feature allows for full searches, and e-mails can quickly be exported from a hold repository on demand.

Other new features of the Fortiva Archiving Suite include Managed Disposition, which allows authorized users to approve dispositions; Infotags to allow companies to automatically mark messages containing privileged information to ensure that they are not shared with opposing counsel during a legal discovery request; proximity search capabilities; and PST import services.

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It only makes sense that vendors in the crowded e-mail archiving space would focus on shoring up their products to help users better accommodate legal discovery and other functions related to e-mail as evidence.

It only makes sense that vendors in the crowded e-mail archiving space would find a way to enhance their products since the market has slowed from its frantic pace of the past few years, said Brian Babineau, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group of Milford, Mass.

Babineau said the panic spending—the spending customers must do for compliance or governance—is slowing, leaving the market opportunity to focus on features that solve problems, like improved resource utilization, elimination of mailbox quotas, and improved application performance. “And discovery is the easiest area of spend,” he said.

Although these are positive moves for both eVault and Fortiva, other e-mail archiving vendors like Iron Mountain and Zantaz have had eDiscovery capabilities for some time.

Those companies, Babineau said, are moving to the next frontier of e-mail archiving—functions like upgrading resource management.

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