Tag Archives: data

May 19, 2015 · 8:58 AM

X1’s Microsoft Enterprise Search Strategy: Better Than Microsoft’s?

By John Patzakis

microsoftIt seems obvious to say, but Microsoft is furthering its supremacy in the enterprise. While Microsoft has always dominated with is ubiquitous OS, it is dramatically consolidating its presence in terms of data sources. Outlook is only increasing in market share with corporate Gmail largely a flop and IBM’s Lotus Notes in full retreat. SharePoint continues to spread across enterprises large and small, dominating the ECM landscape. OneDrive for business, with its tight integration with the Windows 10 OS, essentially zero cost, and built-in active directory security, looks to eventually capture the enterprise file synch and sharing space. And Office 365 combines Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive into an integrated cloud offering (but not search – more on that in a bit). Finally, Skype for Business and OneNote round out the data sources that we believe will soon constitute up to 90 percent of enterprise data relevant for business productivity. So I would argue that we are entering a new era of Microsoft dominance.

And actually, this good news for X1 users, and we believe a key reason for the resurgent high growth we are seeing here at X1. Why? Each of those mentioned Microsoft data sources are either currently supported by X1 or will be supported within 12 months’ time, and X1 provides a much better user search experience than even Microsoft does. As an example, any X1 user will tell you X1 provides a much better search of Outlook and Exchange email than Outlook itself, and the simple viewing of this SharePoint video should convince anyone that our SharePoint search experience is far superior than that of native SharePoint. The same is true of local and network documents and very soon OneDrive (September 2015), and after that Skype for Business.

But even more important than having a better search experience for individual Microsoft data sources, what X1 uniquely provides is a popular and intuitive unified interface or a “single pane of glass” from which to search all of these various data sources. To be able to search your emails, your files, your SharePoint, your OneDrive, and all the other Microsoft data sources from that single interface is extremely compelling. In fact, Microsoft itself does not really have a single pane of glass capability. You cannot effectively search your SharePoint or OneDrive from Outlook, just as you cannot search your emails, Skypes or your local documents from SharePoint.

This new era of Microsoft data source dominance presents important considerations for organizations when selecting enterprise search solutions. Many enterprise search solutions are simply not architected to effectively support this new paradigm and thus are fighting against the Microsoft current, instead of providing a unified search platform, such as X1, that augments and strengthens a company’s Microsoft strategy. To summarize, here are five key reasons X1 excels in this new Microsoft era:

  1. X1 Starts with End User’s email and files. Most enterprise search solutions address enterprise data sources on Intranets, databases, and file shares, but ignore the end users email and local documents. This is missing about 80 percent of the end user’s key business data, while focusing on the data in the margins. To be successful in this new Microsoft era, a true productivity search solution should begin with the end users’ local emails, attachments and documents and extend to SharePoint, file shares and other key enterprise sources, all in a single pane of glass.
  2. No or Minimal Data Migration. Other enterprise search tools uniformly provide web portals for employees to search for their content. This is fine for some Intranet sites and other web-based data, but is not where you want search your day-to-day emails and working documents. And when it comes to SharePoint, any suggestion that such data should be migrated out of SharePoint just so another enterprise search vendor can search it on a similar website is a non-starter. For a successful Microsoft strategy, the indexes must be on a local, physical or virtual desktop (or laptop), indexed in place, or federate to the built-in native FAST indexes. Data migration out of Microsoft data sources no longer make any sense and should be a thing of the past.
  3. X1 Supports Virtualization and Cloud. The next generation enterprise is virtual, whether cloud or on premise. With Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft data sources being able to be deployed in these and on-premise virtual environments, enterprise search, including desktop search (VDI and DaaS) platforms need to do so as well. This is a significant challenge for most enterprise search tools that are either hardware appliances or require intricate and labor intensive installation onto physical hardware.
  4. X1 provides a better search experience than Microsoft does. “Good enough” is not good enough when it comes to search. It does not make sense to invest in an enterprise search solution for business productivity search, unless there is a significant improvement in the end-users search experience for emails, files and SharePoint data. The main reason enterprise search initiatives fail is because the stakeholders do not appreciate that business productivity search is all about end-user experience. Without the end-users embracing your search platform in practice, as X1 users do, the project will fail, no matter how cool the analytics and advanced algorithms sound in theory.
  5. Unified Single Pane of Glass. Providing one single pane of glass to a business worker’s most critical information assets is key. Requiring end-users to search Outlook for email in one interface, then log into another to search SharePoint, and then another to search for document and OneDrive is a non-starter. A single interface to search for information, no matter where it lives fits the workflow that business workers require.

These are all very important factors for buyers of enterprise search solutions to consider in the new Microsoft era, and we of course believe X1 is uniquely up to the task.

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Filed under Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Enterprise Search, Virtualized Environment

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August 7, 2012 · 4:23 PM

The Global De-Centralized Enterprise: An Un-Met eDiscovery Challenge

Enterprises with data situated within a multitude of segmented networks across North America and the rest of the world face unique challenges for eDiscovery and compliance-related investigation requirements. In particular, the wide area networks of large project engineering, oil & gas, and systems integration firms typically contain terabytes of geographically disparate information assets in often harsh operating environments with very limited network bandwidth. Information management and eDiscovery tools that require data centralization or run on expensive and inflexible hardware appliances cannot, by their very nature, address critical project information in places like Saudi Arabia, China, or the Alaskan North Slope.

Despite vendor marketing hype, network bandwidth constraints coupled with the requirement to migrate data to a single repository render traditional information management and eDiscovery tools ineffective to address de-centralized global enterprise data. As such, the global decentralized enterprise represents a major gap for in-house eDiscovery processes, resulting in significant expense and inefficiencies. The case of U.S. ex rel. McBride v. Halliburton Co. [1]  illustrates this pain point well. In McBride, Magistrate Judge John Facciola’s instructive opinion outlines Halliburton’s eDiscovery struggles to collect and process data from remote locations:

Since the defendants employ persons overseas, this data collection may have to be shipped to the United States, or sent by network connections with finite capacity, which may require several days just to copy and transmit the data from a single custodian . . . (Halliburton) estimates that each custodian averages 15–20 gigabytes of data, and collection can take two to ten days per custodian. The data must then be processed to be rendered searchable by the review tool being used, a process that can overwhelm the computer’s capacity and require that the data be processed by batch, as opposed to all at once. [2]

Halliburton represented to the court that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on eDiscovery for only a few dozen remotely located custodians. The need to force-collect the remote custodians’ entire set of data and then sort it out through the expensive eDiscovery processing phase instead of culling, filtering and searching the data at the point of collection drove up the costs.

Despite the burdens associated with the electronic discovery of distributed data across the four corners of the earth, such data is considered accessible under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and thus must be preserved and collected if relevant to a legal matter. However, the good news is that the preservation and collection efforts can and should be targeted to only potentially relevant information limited to only custodians and sources with a demonstrated potential connection to the litigation matter in question.

This is important as the biggest expense associated with eDiscovery is the cost of overly inclusive preservation and collection. Properly targeted preservation initiatives are permitted by the courts and can be enabled by adroit software that is able to quickly and effectively access and search these data sources throughout the enterprise. The value of targeted preservation is recognized in the Committee Notes to the FRCP amendments, which urge the parties to reach agreement on the preservation of data and the key words, date ranges and other metadata to identify responsive materials. [3]  And In re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, the court noted that “[p]reservation efforts can become unduly burdensome and unreasonably costly unless those efforts are targeted to those documents reasonably likely to be relevant or lead to the discovery of relevant evidence.” [4]

However, such targeted collection and ECA in place is not feasible in the decentralized global enterprise with current eDiscovery and information management tools. What is needed to address these challenges for the de-centralized enterprise is a field-deployable search and eDiscovery solution that operates in distributed and virtualized environments on-demand within these distributed global locations where the data resides. In order to meet such a challenge, the eDiscovery and search solution must immediately and rapidly install, execute and efficiently operate in a localized virtualized environment, including public or private cloud deployments, where the site data is located, without rigid hardware requirements or on-site physical access.

This is impossible if the solution is fused to hardware appliances or otherwise requires a complex on-site installation process. After installation, the solution must be able to index the documents and other data locally and serve up those documents for remote but secure access, search and review through a web browser. As the “heavy lifting” (indexing, search, and document filtering) is all performed locally, this solution can effectively operate in some of the harshest local environments with limited network bandwidth. The data is not only collected and culled within the local area network, but is also served up for full early case assessment and first pass review on site, so that only a much smaller data set of potentially relevant data is ultimately transmitted to a central location.

This ground breaking capability is what X1 Rapid Discovery provides. Its ability to uniquely deploy and operate in the IaaS cloud also means that the solution can install anywhere within the wide-area network, remotely and on-demand. This enables globally decentralized enterprises to finally address their overseas data in an efficient, expedient defensible and highly cost effective manner.

If you have any thoughts or experiences with the unique eDiscovery challenges of the de-centralized global enterprise, feel free to email me. I welcome the collaboration.

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[1] 272 F.R.D. 235 (2011)

[2] Id at 240.

[3] Citing the Manual for Complex Litigation (MCL) (4th) §40.25 (2)):

[4] 2007 WL 1655757 (June 5, 2007 E.D.Mo.)

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February 8, 2012 · 8:50 AM

A Real World Social Media Discovery Case Study From the Trenches

As mentioned in my last post, many law firms and eDiscovery service providers have in recent months extensively discussed social media discovery in a general fashion. Such dialogue is important and educational, but it is  great to see the innovative service firm D4 highlighting their major league, battle tested social media discovery capabilities by outlining a case study where they delivered a huge win for their clients.

D4, experts in computer forensics and eDiscovery consulting, recently tackled a case involving the capture of several dozen Facebook and LinkedIn accounts amounting to over 2 million items. Utilizing X1 Social Discovery, D4 rapidly collected and searched through these items to quickly pare down the item count to roughly 7,000. Once the social media data set was at 7,000 items, D4 exported the data into the review platform Relativity.

In addition to D4’s prowess, three critical factors served as game changers to allow for this exercise that would otherwise have been impossible without best practices technology. First, D4 was able to collect these 2 million items on a highly automated basis with X1 Social Discovery. If screen captures were used instead, it may literally take a year to capture that volume of data. Second, once captured those two million items were indexed at the point of collection and placed within a designated case to allowing for searching, sorting and analysis in a single interface and case-centric workflow. D4’s efforts reveal how X1’s workflow and patented fast-as-you type search enables very effective early case assessment for social media.

Finally, X1 Social Discovery’s unique ability to capture several dozens of metadata fields for social media was extremely important to the case. D4 states:

“We were able to take advantage of the metadata fields captured by D4 during the collection process…The attorneys were able to go through the posts in less than two days and found a dozen or more posts that were critical to the case. In my opinion, without using the tools and expertise offered by D4 they never would have found the evidence.”

We agree.

Law Technology NewsAnd on a related recent development, John Waters of Law Technology News published a review of X1 Social Discovery after his extensive testing, and the results are consistent with the scalable functionality leveraged by D4:

“In my tests, X1 (Social Discovery) was fast and responsive…The interface is clean and simple, with a logical layout. And the feature set is just about everything you could ask for as you dig into the burgeoning mounds of status updates, tweets, digital pictures, hash tags, comments, and links. I was impressed with X1’s ability to search globally across the public feeds of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn with the X1 Search engine’s fast-as-you-type feature. The product’s ability to scale makes it flexible enough to allow e-discovery pros to cope with a massive and rapidly expanding source of potential evidence.”

The broader point in both of these examples is that X1 Social Discovery is enabling technology that allows law firms, consultants, and other practitioners to transition from just talking about social media discovery to winning big league cases with cutting edge technology.

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Filed under Best Practices, Preservation & Collection, Social Media Metadata

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October 3, 2011 · 7:36 PM

Facebook Evidence Disallowed By Court Due to Lack of “Identifying Characteristics”

There has been a lot of discussion on the recent case of State of Connecticut vs. Eleck, 2011 WL 3278663 (Conn.App. 2011), which highlights the importance of employing best practices technology to collect, preserve and produce social media evidence. In this case, defendant Robert Eleck sought to admit Facebook evidence at trial that would have impeached a prosecution witness, Simone Judway.  Judway denied authorship of the Facebook messages in question, claiming someone must have hacked her account, even though the evidence revealed that the hacking occurred after the subject messages were sent.  The court determined that Eleck, who offered only a simple printout of the Facebook items, failed to adequately authenticate the data, ruling that “it was incumbent on the defendant, as the proponent, to advance other foundational proof to authenticate that the proffered messages did, in fact, come from Judway and not simply from her Facebook account.”

Importantly, the court noted that while the emergence of social media evidence does not necessarily require new rules of evidence, “circumstantial evidence that tends to authenticate a communication is somewhat unique to each medium.”  The court cited precedent cases where emails, chat logs and texts were properly admitted based upon their supporting and unique metadata and other circumstantial evidence that provide “identifying characteristics.” See, e.g. United States v. Siddiqui, 235 F.3d1318, 1322-23 (11th Cir.2000) (e-mails properly authenticated when they included defendant’s e-mail address, the reply function automatically dialed defendant’s e-mail address as sender, messages contained factual details known to defendant, messages included defendant’s 625*625 nickname, and other metadata.) Dickens v. State, 175 Md.App. 231, 927 A.2d 32, 36-38 (2007) (threatening text messages received by victim on cell phone were properly authenticated when circumstantial evidence provided adequate proof message was sent by defendant); In re F.P., 878 A.2d91, 93-95 (Pa.Super.Ct.2005) (instant messages properly authenticated through circumstantial evidence including screen names and context of messages and surrounding circumstances).


State v. Eleck clearly illustrates why it is important to collect and preserve Tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn entries in a thorough manner with best-practices technology specifically designed for litigation purposes.  For instance, there are over twenty unique metadata fields associated with individual Facebook posts and messages. Any one of those entries or a combination of them contrasted with other entries can provide unique circumstantial evidence that can establish foundational proof of authorship. (We identify the nearly two dozen fields of unique Twitter metadata in our social media evidence white paper).

When lawyers and their service providers rely on simple screen captures, printouts or even compliance archiving solutions that fail to collect and preserve all key metadata to admit social media into evidence, they run a significant risk of having key evidence in support of their client’s case disallowed by the court.

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September 28, 2011 · 6:53 PM

Authentication of Social Media Evidence

With over 800 million Facebook users and 200 million people with Twitter accounts, evidence from social media sites can be relevant to just about every litigation dispute and investigation matter. Social media evidence is widely discoverable and generally not subject to privacy constraints when established to be relevant to a case, particularly when that data is held by a party to litigation or even a key witness. However recent court decisions reflect that the main pressing concern for attorneys, eDiscovery practitioners and investigators is the authentication of social media data for admission into evidence in court.

We have devoted a whitepaper to this important topic (download it here) with some good feedback. The bottom line is that absent  uncontroverted and cooperative witness testimony, lawyers must turn to circumstantial evidence to help establish an evidentiary foundation for social media evidence. This is where utilizing best practices technology that 1) establishes an effective chain of custody of the collected social media; and 2) captures all available metadata without alteration is essential.

Metadata is particularly important as under US Federal Rule of Evidence 901(b)(4) evidence, including electronic data, can be authenticated through circumstantial evidence that reflects the “contents, substance, internal patterns, or other distinctive characteristics” of the proffered evidence. And social media items contain a wealth of key meta data that represent or can establish “internal patterns or other distinctive characteristics” of the social media items in question. I will be posting more specifics concerning social media metadata and its potential importance in court in a few days.

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