October 7, 2014 · 6:52 AM

Top Five Reasons to Attend X1’s Enterprise Search Webinar

This Wednesday, October 8 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, X1 will host a very interesting webinar focused on “Enterprise Search That Actually Works.”  In this session, Webinar imagewe will look at how organizations can finally get to a point where employees are actually able to find what they are looking for in the mountains of digital information that exists.  At the heart of this webinar is the idea that end-users are the key to successful search projects.

It is, after all, end-users that are searching for information all day, every day.  Successful search initiatives must capture and please those end-users.  But, IT projects tend to be pushed out from a central IT organization rather than “pulled” in by the end users.  The result, in terms of enterprise search, was failed projects where a lot of money was spent, but users were still not able to find what they were looking for.

The good news is that there is a better way to approach enterprise search by focusing on the end-user and making “business productivity search” a priority.  In this upcoming webinar, we will show you exactly how to deploy enterprise search in a way that works – making both IT and end-users happy.  There are five main reasons you will not want to miss this webinar:

  1. A realistic case study from Capgemini. Marcus Stimler, Capgemini’s UK CTO, will join us and describe the challenges he addressed with X1 and how focusing on the needs of users drives the broader enterprise search strategy.  Marcus will bring a pragmatic viewpoint from the trenches and is able to answer questions from those of you in a similar position wondering how to make enterprise search work.
  2. A demo-based approach to getting the point across. Sure, we will go through a couple of PowerPoint slides, but most of the webinar will feature an example of how to actually get buy-in from the end-users and provide them with a search tool that delivers productivity.  And, we will show you how to extend outward from the end-user to address more and more enterprise repositories as needed.
  3. A chance to learn from and avoid the mistakes of the past.  Those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat it – that’s why we will look at how traditional approaches to enterprise search did not work.  More importantly, we will show you how to change those approaches to capture the end-users and make search work in a way that works for your organization’s IT environment.
  4. A new way to look at enterprise search. Too often, search is just another IT project and organizations miss the fact that search functionality can and should evolve.  This webinar will focus on search as a journey that goes beyond the initial “project.”  In fact, the Capgemini case study will be a perfect example of a search initiative that evolves – and does so from the core premise that end-users must be happy and able to easily find what they are looking for.
  5. A special thank you gift that will outline how to succeed with enterprise search. All attendees will be given an as-yet-unpublished paper on how to make enterprise search work.  This paper will outline the mistakes to avoid and provide the strategic elements for effective business productivity search.

We hope you can join us for this webinar.  It should be a fun hour and we like to keep it interactive by taking your questions throughout the webinar.  Please register now if you haven’t already.

 

 

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September 23, 2014 · 10:01 AM

Why Printing Social Media Pages is a Bad Idea and May Violate an Attorney’s Duty of Competence

by John Patzakis

scales-justice-no-printCases involving social media are published on a daily basis, and if social media evidence doesn’t routinely factor into your litigation (if you are a lawyer) or electronic investigation practice (if you are a consultant or in law enforcement) then you are likely missing massive amounts of relevant evidence.

With that in mind, when reviewing the recent case law involving social media evidence over the past several weeks, one case that particularly stands out is Stallings v. City of Johnston, 2014 WL 2061669 (S.D. Ill. May 19, 2014), which clearly illustrates that printing out Facebook pages for production in eDiscovery is a really bad (and expensive) idea.  In this case, plaintiff Jayne Stallings brought suit for wrongful employment termination against the City of Johnston, her former employer. And it seems that Stallings, like millions of others, was an avid and highly opinionated Facebook poster.

So to respond to discovery requests, Plaintiff’s counsel and a paralegal spent a full week printing out the contents of Plaintiff’s Facebook account — which amounted to over 500 printed pages — manually rearranging them, and then redacting them. Plaintiff counsel also claimed that she could not provide the relevant Facebook information on a disk, and thus had to resort to paper production.

This exercise was obviously costly. A week of paralegal and lawyer time could easily run $25,000 and no client should pay anywhere near that amount for a task that, with best practices technology, would require minutes instead of days to perform. But the high cost is only the tip of the iceberg.

The stakes regarding social media evidence are now even higher, as recent revisions to the American Bar Association rule on competence requires lawyers to both understand the basic features of technology and to be informed of the risks and benefits associated with the use (or non-use) of relevant technology. (Model Rules of Prof’l Conduct R. 1.1 cmt 6). Many legal commentators note that the duty of competence arguably requires lawyers to conduct online investigations of opposing parties, key witnesses, jurors, including looking at social media. To do that, lawyers must understand how to utilize social media in the most effective manner.

For instance, there is a wealth of publically available social media evidence relating to opponents and key witnesses alone. Our clients are routinely collecting thousands, and often hundreds of thousands of social media items in a single case. The ability to cast a wider net and quickly sift through the data through powerful searches and metadata filters (and provide a very efficient means for electronic production that Stallings’ lawyer claimed was impossible) enables much more relevant evidence to be found and utilized to advance the case. When lawyers and their representatives resort to print screen, they are dramatically limiting the scope of their collection and are failing to collect key metadata. What should take a few minutes with automated best practice tools would require several days, if not weeks, if the manual print screen command is used. In addition, simple screen captures are not defensible, with several courts disallowing or otherwise calling into question social media evidence presented in the form of a screen shot image.

Modern evidenceThe good news is, unlike other areas of digital evidence, there is no trade-off with speed, cost and defensibility by utilizing best practices technology. Quite the opposite. X1 Social Discovery, is much faster, much more defensible and — as the Stallings case illustrates— much less expensive than print screen. So you can either have your cake and eat it too with X1, or incur much higher costs, overlook mountains of potentially case-winning evidence, arguably violate your ethical duty of competence, and face evidentiary challenges in court with print screen. Your call.

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September 10, 2014 · 8:33 AM

End-User Computing & Search Go Hand-In-Hand

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by Barry Murphy

Last week, John Patzakis here at X1 blogged about the VMworld 2014 event and how it has become the Comdex for enterprise IT.  I was at the show and it was very clear that end-users are the future of IT.  The trend has been talked about for quite some time and is commonly called the consumerization of IT.  The heat around that topic has tended to focus on devices and not as much on what is behind information access on those devices.  But, as BYOD takes off and mobility becomes increasingly important, enterprises care more and more about the flow and availability of information.  Why?  Because easy access to information is critical to the end-user acceptance of enterprise IT offerings; when users cannot quickly find what they are looking for, they reject what IT rolls out to them.  Without that end-user acceptance, there is no chance for a positive ROI on any IT project.

End-user experience is so key that VMware has named a division of its company “End User Computing.”  That EUC unit made several major acquisitions in the last year, including Airwatch and Desktone.  This is because technology providers need to win the battle with end-users.  For an example of a company that built its business on the backs of end-users and leveraged those relationships to bully its way into enterprise IT, look no further than Apple.  As VDI users have learned, it is critical to bake search requirements into virtual desktop deployments from the get-go in order to ensure an optimal user experience.  And, as Brian Katz points out in his blog, the same thing will hold true with mobile – usability will be key.  That is why we at X1 are so excited about the future.  X1’s user interface for search is second to none.  And, users actually rave about it.

In my days as an industry analyst, I rarely had technology users raving about the tools they were using.  And, I never ever had an enterprise search user tell me that their solution solved the challenge of finding information quickly.  The rabid users of X1 have been an eye opener for me.  In fact, an X1 customer recently polled its users and virtually every user said that X1 is easy to learn and use (no easy feat for a piece of enterprise software) and over 70% of users described their experience with X1 as very positive or positive.  Those numbers are unheard of in terms of technology satisfaction.

With what I’ve learned from my days as an analyst and in my time here at X1, I’ve come up with some ways to approach enterprise search in a way that is both IT and user-friendly.  We will share the knowledge in a webinar on October 9 at 1pm ET / 10am PT.  We’ve titled it, “Making Enterprise Search Actually Work by Putting User Experience First.”

In this “no-death-by-PowerPoint” webinar, attendees will not only learn, but actually see how to deploy enterprise search solutions in ways that make both end-users and IT departments happy.  This webinar will demonstrate both why and how to put end-user experience first.   Specifically, attendees will learn:

  • Why the human brain is the best analytical engine for business productivity search
  • How federation can save IT time, money, and headaches
  • How to best deploy search solutions in all IT infrastructures
  • How to achieve ROI on enterprise search in ways never seen in the past
  • That search can be like BASF – it can make many other technology deployments better, including VDI, SharePoint, and Enterprise Vault

I will be presenting on this webinar and will be joined by some special guests to be named later.  Come learn why search and end-user computing go hand-in-hand.

Register for the webinar here >

 

 

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September 2, 2014 · 9:27 AM

VMworld Recap: Major Disruption in Store for Enterprise Search & eDiscovery

by John Patzakis

VMworld

Last week we attended and exhibited at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, VMware’s annual conference that brings together over 25,000 thought leaders, subject matter experts, technology providers and IT professionals to immerse themselves in the latest in virtualization and cloud technology. VMworld is now essentially the modern-day COMDEX, spread out among the sprawling Moscone Center. The difference is that VMworld’s exclusive focus is the enterprise, and more specifically the modern and trending IT enterprise. VMworld is where the forward thinking enterprise CIOs are now, and where everyone else will be in the next 2-4 years.

In the opening keynote, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger — who recently explained to the Wall Street Journal that “we are in the period of the greatest tectonic shift in the IT industry in the last 30 years” — emphasized the trend of “frictionless IT” running the enterprise where “everything is virtualized” utilizing a hybrid mix of on-premise virtualization, public and private cloud.  Frictionless IT involves a model where pools of virtual machines — comprising virtual desktops and servers running in either the public cloud or a private cloud — are managed by IT administrators enterprise-wide from a single console, without physically touching any hardware. This allows for virtual desktops, servers and supporting applications and software upgrades to be rolled out and managed on a highly automated basis, including having resources moved from private to public clouds and back again, all with a few mouse clicks.

So given the importance of this conference to the present and future of enterprise IT, it was highly notable that X1 was the only enterprise search provider present among more than 400 exhibitors. It is actually surprising that no other search vendors were here given how quickly attendees ‘got it.’  They understood that search is the elephant in the room for VDI and other enterprise-stored data and quickly responded positively to X1’s message. The reason for our competitors’ absence, in my opinion, is that nearly all the current enterprise search software vendors, as well as eDiscovery tools, represent legacy technology that does not support deployment into highly virtualized environments. Traditional enterprise search solutions are limited to either appliances or arduous manual on-site installations, neither of which can operate in true virtual environments. In other words, they represent a very high degree of friction, with entrenched architectures that must be completely re-written in order to support virtualization and the new frictionless IT paradigm.

And the thing about truly supporting cloud and on-premise virtualization is that enterprise software vendors cannot fake it with enterprise CIOs and their staff. For instance, there is a high degree of “cloud-washing” in eDiscovery, where vendors host their own attorney review systems on a SaaS basis, and thereby claim they are cloud innovators. And while there is a legitimate but limited use case there, a complete process baked into the enterprise and its information management DNA needs to encompass integrated preservation, collection and early data assessment — including first pass review. Such an eDiscovery system must be on premise and will not survive unless it truly operates in a virtualized environment, whether in the public or private cloud.

Solutions that truly support virtualization are VMware-ready certified, and can also be quickly and remotely installed into the public cloud through a readily available machine image, such as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for the Amazon Web Services cloud. In essence, major enterprise software now has to effectively install almost as easily as a mobile phone app.

As an aside, another notable observation that I believe is highly indicative of this “tectonic shift” was the near complete absence of the major systems integrators, with the exception of Capgemini. Most of the other top 10 SIs were completely absent and the few others there had a very minimal presence. This is, again in my opinion, because most of these systems integrators thrive on a “friction” model (think nine-month enterprise software installation), and are struggling to adapt to the new world order.

In our recent discussions with folks at Amazon Web Services, they recounted amusing stories of companies asking to send hardware appliances or teams of expensive consultants to AWS data centers to index and manage their data for enterprise search and eDiscovery purposes. Both scenarios are non-starters for public cloud architectures. This is where X1 is leading the charge for both enterprise search and eDiscovery.

We are very excited about our partnership with VMware, and the hundreds of contacts and new and existing customers we connected with at the show. And more exciting things are to come. Stay tuned for exciting announcements in the coming months. In the meantime, I recommend you start making plans for VMworld next year.

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August 19, 2014 · 8:15 AM

VMworld 2014 Hot Topics – VDI, Hybrid Cloud & Mobility

VMworldNext week, the VMworld conference kicks off and all of us at X1 are excited.  VMworld gives X1 the opportunity to introduce our newly-minted VMware Ready products – X1 Search 8, X1 Search 8 Virtual Edition, and X1 Rapid Discovery – to VMware users.  Perhaps more importantly, though, the conference is an opportunity to hear where the world is moving with regard to several hot topic areas:  VDI; hybrid cloud; and mobility.

Desktop virtualization promises many benefits: lower IT costs; streamlined administration of IT assets; and end-user flexibility in terms of accessing the desktop from anywhere.  Given the popularity of BYOD, the consumerization of IT, and the need for mobility to support telecommuting, VDI is becoming more and more important.  There look to be some compelling sessions at the show about customer successes using VDI that will show not only that the benefits of VDI are real, but also how others can learn from those successes to continue to drive VDI adoption.  At our booth, X1 will continue to remind folks building unified search into VDI requirements early on can optimize VDI deployments.  At the very least, this will help to ensure that end-users are more receptive to the virtual desktop and allow them to remain productive.  Getting end-users to buy in is often half the battle when deploying new technology.  When it comes to VDI environments, a good search solution must decouple the search UI from the indexing service.  Otherwise, indexing will require virtual desktop computing resources and cut into VDI cost savings.  The goal is to minimize the RAM usage and search client footprint on the virtual desktop.

Hybrid cloud is a combination of a private IT infrastructure and a public cloud.  The public and private cloud infrastructures then communicate over an encrypted connection and can port data and applications back and forth.  Hybrid cloud is hot because it delivers real benefits:  increased speed of access time and reduced latency because of an on-premise, private infrastructure that is accessible directly as opposed to through the internet; more flexibility to have on-premises infrastructure that can support the average workload and to leverage the public cloud when the workload exceeds the power of the private cloud component; and more flexibility in server designs that can lower the costs of storage.  X1 will detail to booth visitors how unified search of information no matter where it lives – cloud, on-premise, hybrid – can make hybrid cloud environments more user-friendly.  Products like X1 Rapid Discovery enable hybrid search that lets IT glean all the benefits of hybrid cloud while ensuring end-users are happy with their ability to find information.

Mobility is an important topic and complementary to both VDI and hybrid cloud.  VDI and hybrid cloud environments will enable business professionals to be mobile and productive.  One of the keys to productivity is fast, easy access to information – and that is exactly what X1 provides.  The architecture for X1 Search 8 Virtual Edition stands to enable better access to information on more and more devices.  We are excited for VMworld because it means the opportunity to meet further with the VMware Airwatch team and understand how X1 can continue to partner with VMware in new and innovative ways.

If you are going to be at VMworld, please come see X1 at Booth #2436.  We would be happy to show you our products and how they can complement existing or planned VMware investments.

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