Category Archives: Corporations

June 17, 2025 · 2:56 PM

X1 Enterprise Is the Gold Standard for Data Separation in M&A Matters

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

X1 is the Gold Standard in Data Separation

Corporate mergers and acquisitions are complex enough on their own — but when a deal involves the divestiture of an entire business unit or a carve-out of specific departments, the stakes for separating data correctly and efficiently become even higher. Legal and IT teams must identify and surgically separate emails, documents, and other unstructured electronic information to ensure that the right data goes to the acquiring party — and that what must be retained remains secure and compliant with privacy and legal requirements.

This data separation exercise is notorious for being time-consuming, extremely expensive, and highly disruptive. This is because traditional methods require heavy lifting by IT teams and service providers, endless back-and-forth with custodians, and mass data collections that literally double the risk. Worse yet, Microsoft Purview, with its known throttling and low throughput challenges for M 365 data, is not up to the task for data separation matters that invariably involve at least dozens of terabytes. These inefficiencies all lead to severe regulatory risks, runaway costs, and critical delays.

There is, however, a far better way — X1 Enterprise. Several major corporations have recently employed X1 Enterprise in high-stakes data separation matters. Once completed, the comments from our customers are the same: There was no other way they could have done it without spending millions of dollars on time-consuming and disruptive services.

Data Separation Is Not Just Another eDiscovery Project

Unlike standard eDiscovery, a divestiture-driven data separation project must carve out large volumes of live, operational data while the business continues to run. Legacy tools and processes require copying and moving the entire subject data set to a separate repository for indexing and searching — adding huge costs, time delays, and operational risk.

X1 Enterprise’s game-changing advantage lies in its distributed micro-indexing architecture and true index-in-place capability. This unique approach allows organizations to instantly search, categorize, and separate or otherwise remediate massive volumes of data where it resides — without duplicating and exporting entire data sets to third-party servers for processing.

In practical terms, this means:

Lightning-Fast Search: X1 Enterprise creates lightweight, local micro-indexes on endpoints and servers across the organization. Search results come back in seconds, no matter where the data lives — on laptops, file shares, or cloud repositories such as M365.

Minimal Disruption: Because the data stays in place, there is no need to duplicate or move sensitive content, minimizing the risk of data leakage, avoiding the bottlenecks that come with data copying and migration for centralized processing, and enabling the actual remediation to be infinitely more effective by working on the live data set. How do you execute data separation when you are working off a stale copy of the data for the categorization effort? The short answer: Up to millions of dollars in manual services to go back to the “original data” and manually separate the data for each employee and their respective data sources.

Scalability and Control: Whether the divestiture involves hundreds or thousands of custodians across geographies, X1 Enterprise scales seamlessly while giving legal and IT teams centralized control and real-time oversight.

Defensible Process: Legal teams can generate audit trails, reports, and logs to demonstrate a precise and defensible chain of custody, which is critical for regulatory and contractual compliance.

The Bottom Line: Much Faster, with Dramatically less Cost and Risk.

When time is money — and delays can put entire deals at risk — organizations cannot afford cumbersome, legacy eDiscovery workflows for carve-out data separation projects. X1 Enterprise’s innovative architecture empowers legal, compliance, and IT teams to execute precise data separations faster, with dramatically lower cost and business impact.

For any organization facing a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, X1 Enterprise is not just an upgrade — it is the modern standard for high-stakes data separation and governance.

Learn more about how X1 Enterprise can streamline your next M&A project. Schedule a demo today at sales@x1.com or visit  www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Study, Cloud Data, compliance, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

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June 11, 2025 · 9:48 AM

X1 Search Version 10: A Game-Changer for Modern Enterprise Search

By John Patzakis

Enterprise search has long been a pain point for organizations—fragmented data, slow retrieval, and outdated architectures have left businesses struggling to find information efficiently, resulting in millions of hours of lost productivity. But with the release of X1 Search Version 10, a new era has arrived—one that redefines how business professionals search, discover, and act on their information across cloud and endpoint ecosystems.

And the standout features? Full integration with Slack, enhanced support for Microsoft 365, support for Gmail and Google Drive and numerous other cloud data sources, as well as improvements to our enterprise-grade speed and scalability! With version 10, you can now search Slack in tandem with your email, files, and your Microsoft 365 data sources, including Teams.

Slack and Teams have become the modern enterprise’s water cooler and meeting room rolled into one. It is where you and your colleagues have critical conversations, exchange files, and document decisions. But until now, most enterprise search tools could not index Slack effectively, let alone allow unified searching across Slack and email.

X1 Search 10 changes the game by uniquely enabling real-time search across Slack messages, channels, and attachments alongside your Outlook, M365, Google Workspace, files, and more—all in a single interface. This allows business professionals to instantly search all their key information and full context of communication threads, no matter where their conversations took place. Imagine searching, seeing, and acting on your relevant Slack chats, Teams chats, email threads, and related documents side by side, in seconds. No toggling between systems. No data blind spots. Just instant insight and supercharged productivity.

Speed, Scale, and Simplicity with Micro-Indexing
What makes this lightning-fast and massively scalable experience possible is X1’s patented search and micro-indexing architecture. Unlike legacy systems that first require inefficient, time-consuming crawlers to collect, duplicate, and then transfer the data en masse into central repositories, which is a recipe for failure, X1 indexes data in-place. This means:

• No massive data movement
• Real-time indexing at the source
• Full maintenance of user permissions and access controls
• Lightning-fast search response times—even across multi-terabyte datasets

This distributed, index-in-place model is purpose-built for today’s data environment, where critical content lives across cloud platforms (Microsoft 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Slack), endpoints, MS Exchange Servers, and file shares. With X1, organizations get a true federated view of enterprise content—without sacrificing speed, security, information governance, or user experience.

Legacy Enterprise Search Is Officially Obsolete
Traditional enterprise search tools—built for centralized environments—are no match for the demands of the modern workplace. As data continues to fragment across cloud platforms, remote endpoints, and collaboration apps like Slack and Teams, the old Enterprise Content Management (ECM) model of copy and migration to centralized indexing is completely untenable in terms of the laws of physics as well as creating significant security and governance risks.

X1 Search leapfrogs past those outdated architectures. With native support for Slack, robust Microsoft 365 integration, and enterprise-grade security and scalability, X1 enables rapid search and collection across the full digital workplace.

No more hours of lost productivity per week. Just real-time, precise search across your enterprise data—wherever it lives.

X1 Search Version 10 is now available. Ready to see it in action? Watch a 4-minute demo or obtain a free trial license (no credit card required) now.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Desktop Search, Enterprise Search, Hybrid Search, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, Records Management, SharePoint, X1 Search 10

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May 20, 2025 · 12:04 PM

Law Firms and Major Enterprises Are Rapidly Moving to X1 Search As Traditional Enterprise Search Becomes Obsolete

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

Are you tired of wasting hours each week fruitlessly searching across emails, documents, cloud services, and local drives? You’re not alone. Law firms and major enterprises are increasingly recognizing the inherent limitations of legacy enterprise search solutions and turning decisively toward X1 Search.

X1 Search delivers a revolutionary user-based search experience that dramatically boosts productivity. Demand for X1 Search has skyrocketed this year—one major federal agency is expanding from 20,000 to over 40,000 licenses to equip every employee. Nearly half of AMLAW 100 firms now deploy or are actively considering X1. Why this rapid shift?

Traditional enterprise search solutions are fundamentally broken in today’s hybrid-cloud enterprise landscape. They rely heavily on outdated architectures that require mass data duplication and centralization—approaches rendered obsolete by remote work and distributed platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Specifically, traditional tools face:

  1. Scalability Roadblocks: Centralizing terabytes of distributed unstructured data is now effectively impossible in the modern enterprise.
  2. Incompatibility with Modern Platforms: Legacy systems struggle to integrate effectively with platforms like Microsoft 365 due to restrictive APIs and loss of security permissions when the data is copied and exported en masse.
  3. Regulatory and Governance Challenges: Mass duplication of sensitive data violates critical data protection regulations and contradicts fundamental information governance principles. The GDPR specifically mandates data minimization, particularly when viable alternative technologies exist, as evaluated through a Data Privacy Impact Analysis (DPIA).

Employees in modern organizations effectively have two viable search options: the limited native Windows search or the robust, efficient capabilities of X1 Search. Microsoft Copilot itself recently highlighted X1 Search’s advantages:

“X1 Search offers advanced indexing, instant search-as-you-type capabilities, powerful filtering, keyword highlighting, and document/email previews, significantly surpassing standard Windows Search. Moreover, X1 seamlessly searches across emails, documents, cloud storage, archived data, and more—far beyond Windows Search capabilities.”

X1 Search introduces an entirely new, distributed search architecture uniquely suited to today’s enterprise environments:
• Distributed Micro-Indexing: Patented technology ensures secure, permission-aligned indexing, granting employees immediate, secure access to authorized data only.
• No Mass Data Duplication: Interact directly with original documents without unnecessary duplication, ensuring compliance and efficiency.
• True Federated Search: Search instantly and iteratively across M365, Google Workspace, Slack, and local data sources within a single unified search field—a capability unmatched by any other solution.

The latest X1 Search transcends desktop limitations, instantly searching Microsoft Email, Teams, Slack, OneDrive, SharePoint, local files, and now Google Drive and Gmail, all from one intuitive interface. This empowers users to reclaim hours each day, dramatically boosting productivity.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, Desktop Search, eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, GDPR, Google Workspace, Hybrid Search, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint

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February 25, 2025 · 9:34 AM

True Index-in-Place Capability for Global Enterprise eDiscovery and Information Governance Only Possible with Distributed Micro-Indexing Architecture

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

As legal and compliance teams grapple with exponential data growth, the need for faster, more efficient eDiscovery has never been greater. One key trend emerging from the 2025 State of Industry Report by eDiscovery Today is the growing demand for in-place indexing, with 15.5% of respondents citing it as a critical priority. But achieving true ‘index-in-place’ without bulk data transfers or excessive infrastructure costs—requires a fundamentally different architecture: distributed micro-indexing.

Unlike traditional eDiscovery tools that rely on centralized crawling and bulk data transfers, X1 Enterprise’s distributed micro-indexing architecture allows organizations to search, analyze, and collect data directly at the source—without moving vast amounts of information to a separate processing environment. This means faster insights, lower costs, and reduced security risks.

However, with this capability being highly valued, many vendors have parroted this messaging but have offerings that do not qualify as true index-in-place. Unlike traditional enterprise search or eDiscovery platforms that rely on centralized indexing (e.g., crawling, copying, and transferring all the data into a single repository), X1’s micro-indexing distributes the workload. It creates small, efficient indexes at the data source—whether a user’s laptop, email server, or a cloud source such as Microsoft 365 —and unifies search results on-demand. Transferring data in bulk to a central appliance or server farm via a crawling agent or Robocopy function does not qualify. A true index-in-place using distributed micro-indexes uniquely enables scalability, targeted collection and minimizes security and data governance risks in eDiscovery and information governance matters.

Earlier this year, a Fortune 500 company faced a massive eDiscovery and GDPR compliance challenge: indexing and searching over 70 terabytes of data across Microsoft 365 and on-premises sources—all without disrupting operations. With X1 Enterprise, they accomplished this in just a few weeks—a feat impossible with traditional solutions that rely on slow, centralized processing.

X1’s unique approach is based upon distributed, micro-indexing search and collection capabilities. Below are the top ten benefits of this architecture tailored to eDiscovery and enterprise data governance and how it differs from alternative approaches.

  1. Rapid, In-Place Data Identification: Legal teams can locate relevant documents across endpoints, cloud sources, and network drives instantly—without waiting for slow, centralized crawls. X1’s micro-indexing creates lightweight, decentralized indexes at the endpoint level (e.g., individual laptops, servers, or cloud accounts).
  2. Real-Time Search Across Distributed Systems: Execute complex, Boolean-rich searches across terabytes of data in Microsoft 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, and beyond. X1 enables real-time, federated searches across up to hundreds of terabytes of multiple data sources (e.g., Microsoft 365, local drives, email archives) from a single interface, leveraging micro-indexes updated at the source.
  3. Minimized Over-Collection Risks: X1’s Micro-indexing allows precise targeting of relevant data, minimizing the need to collect entire datasets for review. X1’s granular indexing supports instantaneous keyword searches and metadata filtering at the source.
  4. Lower eDiscovery Costs: By eliminating the need to transfer and reprocess massive datasets, X1 slashes infrastructure and vendor fees. By indexing and searching data in-place (without moving it to a central repository), X1 nearly eliminates reliance on third-party processing tools and expensive manual services, with dramatically reduced time to review.
  5. Optimized M365 eDiscovery Support: Avoids Microsoft Purview throttling, supports modern attachments, and enables cost-effective, high-speed data access. Each custodian is assigned an individual micro-index which enables X1 to achieve unmatched throughput, support modern attachments without premium licensing, address inactive mailboxes and more.
  6. Massive Scalability: X1’s micro-indexing distributes the workload on a parallelized basis, allowing the index and searching of hundreds of terabytes of data in-place at speeds not seen before in the enterprise eDiscovery and information governance industry. Micro-indexes are updated incrementally and in real-time as new data comes in, rather than requiring batch copying and re-indexing of an entire corpus.
  7. Support for Remote and Hybrid Workforces: X1’s endpoint indexing works seamlessly on distributed devices, ensuring data from remote employees or cloud platforms is readily accessible without requiring physical access.
  8. Proactive Compliance & Risk Monitoring: Instantly identify PII, unencrypted sensitive files, and policy violations across the enterprise. With micro-indexes updated in real-time, X1 allows organizations to monitor for policy violations (e.g., PII exposure, unencrypted sensitive files) across endpoints, fileshares and M365 accounts instantly.
  9. In-Place Remediation and Governance: As the data remains in place, remediation is effectively and accurately applied at scale. This contrasts to other “copy and move” processes that are merely working off-site with copies of your data, rendering effective remediation efforts extremely costly and burdensome, if not impossible.
  10. Data Minimization and GDPR Compliance: X1’s capabilities directly map to the GDPR’s proportionality and data minimization requirements. In contrast, tools that require full disc imaging or bulk copy and transfer for basic eDiscovery collection are extremely problematic.

Conclusion
For legal, compliance, and IT teams struggling with slow, expensive, and inefficient eDiscovery workflows, distributed micro-indexing is the future. X1 Enterprise’s unique in-place search ensures rapid results, reduced costs, and ironclad compliance—without moving or duplicating sensitive data. If your organization relies on Microsoft 365, remote workforces, or high-volume data environments, X1 provides the speed, scalability, and security you need.

Ready to Learn More?
Discover how X1 Enterprise can revolutionize your eDiscovery and compliance strategy. Schedule a demo today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Study, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Information Governance, Preservation & Collection

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January 22, 2025 · 10:34 AM

Inactive Mailboxes in M365 Present Significant Hidden Risks and Costs

By Chas Meier and John Patzakis

In our recent blog post, we outlined the challenges associated with inactive mailboxes in Microsoft 365. The response was very positive, and this post dives a bit deeper into the specific challenges with MS Purview in addressing inactive mailboxes, including some hidden pitfalls and risks that many enterprises may not be aware of.

Limited Visibility in Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview allows users with the eDiscovery Manager role (each provisioned with an E5 license) to search both active and inactive mailboxes to meet legal or regulatory requirements. However, one of the first hurdles administrators face is simply identifying which mailboxes are inactive. Inactive mailboxes do not appear in the standard active user lists and require additional steps to locate, whether through Purview or the Microsoft 365 admin center. An even bigger challenge is Purview’s limitation: when you query for inactive mailboxes, it will only display a maximum of 5,000—even if more exists. One of our customers, for example, discovered tens of thousands of additional inactive mailboxes using X1, far exceeding Purview’s 5,000 limit. Compounding this challenge, Purview cannot distinguish between an inactive mailbox placed on litigation hold versus one on a retention tag for other reasons, leaving organizations unable to quickly determine which mailboxes are truly subject to legal holds.

How Inactive Mailboxes Are Created
This problem partly stems from Microsoft 365’s process for creating inactive users. Under pressure to free up M365 licenses for new employees, administrators might place holds or retention tags on a departing user’s account “just to be safe” until they know how to manage that user’s data. Once the license is removed, a grace period begins; after it expires, the mailbox is moved into the inactive mailbox collection, ensuring its contents remain discoverable for eDiscovery and compliance purposes.

However, there is no built-in mechanism to automatically remove these holds once they are no longer needed, so IT and legal teams must manually intervene. As a result, organizations with high turnover often retain far more inactive mailboxes than necessary. This not only increases legal exposure but will also incur additional costs when Microsoft begins charging storage fees on January 27, 2025 for inactive M365 accounts on retention and legal holds. (Manage unlicensed OneDrive user accounts – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn)

X1 Enterprise 5.3: A Streamlined Approach
With X1 Enterprise 5.3, legal and compliance professionals can now process inactive mailboxes directly within the platform using only a single E5 license and are not subject to Purview’s listing limit of 5,000 inactive mailboxes. This direct integration ensures that all preserved mailboxes are accessible and actionable.

Even better, many of our customers employ X1 Enterprise to proactively perform targeted preservation collections on M365 accounts and other sources such as laptops for departing employees, a streamlined process that significantly reduces both cost and risk.

Please contact us at the link below if you have any additional questions about inactive mailboxes in M365 and would like to inquire about a free “health check” assessment of the scope of your inactive mailboxes.

Ready to Learn More?
The X1 Enterprise Platform is available now from X1 and its global channel network in the cloud, on-premises, and with our services available on-demand. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, law firm, m365

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