Government IT has been characterized by long term monolithic systems that fail to deliver. Part of the problem is approaching IT as a complex durable good, like a battleship, with complete specifications, known life-cycles, and defined missions. Fighter aircraft have six generations of evolving technology and missions, each having known maintenance cycles, life spans, and changing requirements based on future planning and doctrine, as well as, mission feedback. IT has none of that because it has no duty cycle or doctrine. IT can be obsolete on delivery, regardless of development timeframe. IT delivery can redefine all previous requirements. IT has very little longevity, even if successful on delivery.

One of the first tasks that an Enterprise Vault Administrator will perform is the configuring of the Enterprise Vault indexes. Put simply, the indexes allow the searching of the archived items – kind of an important thing. If you were to organize your workspace, wouldn’t you want to know where you placed your Red Swingline stapler or your “Jump to Conclusions” mat? Well, indexes allow you to know where they are. With indexing there are 3 different levels that an administrator can specify; these levels are Brief, Medium, and Full. The actual index size will be a certain percentage of the original items -- 3% for Brief, 8% for Medium, and 12% for Full. Obviously with the Full indexing level, this level will give you the more granular searches when searching the html and text versions of the items in the archive.

Having problems with trying to do eDiscovery with NetBackup? Stop! Just Stop! For the love of NetBackup…. Stop! Find out more about the marriage between NetBackup and Enterprise Vault.

By now most IT managers have heard the buzz around “e-discovery”. Depending on who is asking about it or requesting it, what they expect could be vastly different from what you plan on implementing. With my experience of implementing and supporting e-discovery solutions, I hope to clear up some of the confusion around e-discovery’s nomenclature and shed some light on some e-discovery solutions that provide the most bang for their buck. First off, let’s define e-discovery.

Many organizations implement Enterprise Vault to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements.  Enterprise Vault does a great job at archiving journaled messages and provides legal, compliance and HR department’s quality backend search tools to search and export archived email.  But what’s in it for the Exchange Administrators who already have enough to worry about keeping email running smoothly?  You can hear it already, “we purchased a new application for e-discovery called Enterprise Vault that you need to learn and implement.  Oh, by the way you will be supporting it going forward as well”.