Tag Archives: Solution

July 21, 2015 · 8:47 AM

X1 Social Discovery Available as a Hosted Solution

icons_social_media2X1 Social Discovery is the leading social media and website collection, preservation, and ECA tool on the market.  Customers love it for many reasons:

  • Defensibility: MD5 hash values of individual items are calculated upon capture and maintained through export. Automated logging and reports are generated. Key metadata unique to social media & web streams are captured through deep integration with APIs provided by the publishers. This metadata is important to establishing chain of custody and also provides key evidence relevant to the substantive case as well as authentication.
  • Ease of use: Investigators can take advantage of the patented X1 Search interface that allows fast-as-you-type search, filtering on metadata, and full-fidelity preview of content to quickly find the information of interest.
  • Speed and Scalability: Collect up to hundreds of thousands of items in a single case on an automated basis and search across all the items with lightning fast speed.. Screen shots not only lack defensibility but are far more cumbersome and time consuming.
  • Ease of production: Lawyers love X1 Social Discovery because it fits the litigation workflow perfectly and exports data directly into downstream review tools.  Other customers like the flexible output options such as PDF, native files, or CSV.

To date, X1 Social Discovery has been available only as a local desktop installation.  This works great for customers like law enforcement agencies that need to maintain local possession of evidence by law.  Many law firms and insurance companies we speak with, however, yearn for a hosted solution either because they do not want to manage the huge volume of social media that will be collected or because they are not allowed to possess the content locally.  The latter comes up with many law firms that have made the decision to outsource all evidence handling to service providers, for example, for policy, ethical and cost reasons.

Now, X1 is partnering with D4 and Duff & Phelps to make Social Discovery available on a hosted basis.  This has numerous benefits:

  • Economies of scale on data hosting from cloud providers
  • Do-it-yourself capabilities along with the X1 expertise available from these premier X1 partners
  • Per-matter pricing that allows customers to account for costs by matters (which can be very important to customers like law firms that need to pass through per-matter costs)

In practice, the process is very simple – X1 Social Discovery (which is very deployable in physical, virtual or cloud environments) is stood up in a hosted environment by a service provider. An instance of X1 Social is dedicated to a single case.  The service provider hosts and manages the data, allowing the customer a more economical method of manaing the storage of what can be a high-volume data type.

The highly-respected law firm Lewis Brisbois is taking advantage of this capability early and will be briefly discussing these advantages in tomorrow’s webinar about the importance of social media in litigation.  Already, there are over 800 registrants for this hot topic event.  Attending is a chance to learn how to be ready to handle social media in eDiscovery, as well as why a hosted option can be the right fit.  To join the webinar, click here.

If you would like to talk through the hosted capability further and learn more about the workflow, you can email me directly.

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Filed under SaaS, Social Media Investigations, Social Media Metadata

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November 17, 2014 · 12:01 PM

Amazon Re:Invent – With the Cloud, Avoid Mistakes of the Past

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Amazon Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Over 13,000 people took over the Palazzo for deep dive technical sessions to learn how to harness the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS). reinventThis show had a much different energy than other enterprise software conferences, such as VMworld.  Whereas most conferences feature a great deal of selling and marketing by the host, Amazon Re:Invent was truly more of a training show. Cloud architects spent a lot of time in technical bootcamps learning how AWS works and getting certified as administrators.

That is not to say that there was no selling or marketing going on; the exhibition hall featured myriad vendors that augment or assist with AWS deployments and solutions. The focus on the deep technical details, though, does point out the fact that we are still in the very early days of the cloud. Most of the focus of the keynotes was about getting compute workloads to the cloud – there was not a lot of mention of moving actual data to the cloud, even though that is certainly beginning to happen.  But, that is how the evolution goes. IT departments need to be comfortable moving workloads to the cloud as they begin to leverage the cloud. Building this foundation is also important to Amazon – the goal would be for many companies to completely outsource the IT data center.

It is important, however, to proactive plan for information management as more workloads and, importantly, data move to the cloud.  As the internet first emerged, companies dove into new technologies like email and network file shares only to create eDiscovery nightmares and make it virtually impossible to find information within digital landfills. It is key to learn from those mistakes rather than to repeat them when leveraging cloud-based technologies. In order to ensure both that end-users are happy with search experiences on data in the cloud and that Legal can do what they need to do from an eDiscovery standpoint. This means providing business workers with unified access to email, files, and SharePoint information regardless of where the data lives. It also means giving Legal teams fast search queries and collections. But, Cloud search is slow, as indexes live far from the information. This results in frustrated workers and Legal teams afraid that eDiscovery cannot be completed in time.

If a customer wanted to speed up search, it would have to essentially attach an appliance to a hot-air balloon and send it up to the Cloud provider so that the customer’s index could live on that appliance (or farm of appliances) in the Cloud providers data center, physically near the data. There are many reasons, however, that a Cloud provider would not allow a customer to do that:

  • Long install process
  • Challenging Pre-requisites
  • 3rd party installation concerns
  • Physical access
  • Specific hardware requirements
  • They only scale vertically

The solution to a faster search is a cloud-deployable search application, such as X1 Rapid Discovery. This creates a win-win for Cloud providers and customers alike. As enterprises move more and more information to the Cloud, it will be important to think about workers’ experiences with Cloud systems – and search is one of those user experiences that, if it is a bad one, can really negatively affect a project and cause user revolt. eDiscovery is also a major concern – I’ve worked with organizations that moved data to the cloud before planning how they would handle eDiscovery. That left Legal teams to clean up messes, or more realistically, just deal with the messes. By thinking about these issues before moving data to the cloud, it is possible to avoid these painful occurrences and leverage the cloud without headaches. At X1, we look forward to working closely with Amazon to help customers have the search and eDiscovery solutions they need as more and more data goes to AWS.

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Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, Hybrid Search, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management

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July 15, 2014 · 8:28 AM

The “Desktop” Of The Future

In talking with a business acquaintance recently, a question came up about the future of desktop search:  what happens when the desktop is no longer the interface of choice for business professionals?  It’s a great question, and one I clearly have a vested interest in given X1’s status as the leading desktop search engine.  The reality is that today’s workers access their information from a variety of interfaces across many devices.  What we need to do is think of the desktop less in a literal sense and more in terms of being a user interface for information.

Since the dawn of the PC, the desktop has been the user interface for most business professionals to access information and do their jobs.  The future of that desktop no longer lies in accessing it on a PC, or even a laptop or mobile device.  Given the speed of innovation, it is useless to try and forecast what the “desktop” will look like beyond a five-year timeframe.  Already, there are stories emerging about the desktop being built into things like tabletop coffee tables.  It is absolutely fun and inspiring to see developments like this and to know we are making forward progress in the tech world.  At the same time, we need to make sure that information – which will be stored in a variety of locations, too – is accessible to the business professional no matter what the desktop looks like in the future.

That is why X1’s Search 8 Virtual Edition is so exciting.  The flagship product, Search 8, represents years of experience providing a beloved user interface to a business profession’s most critical information – email, files, SharePoint, etc.  When the product first came out nearly a decade ago, most of that information was stored locally.  Thus, a local index could live on the desktop and X1 could provide fast-as-you-type search results and filtering on that local index.  Given the evolution of the desktop and the variety of devices accessing that desktop, a local index is not always a possibility.  That’s where Search 8 Virtual Edition comes in.  The client interface is decoupled from the index, which can live anywhere (typically off on a server farm).

VDI image

This allows IT teams that have invested in desktop virtualization (VDI) to turn off Windows indexing (necessary to save virtual resources) and still provide business professionals the ability to find their information.  Desktop virtualization enables many of the things that businesses value highly – especially security and mobility – and comes in its own variety of flavors.  VDI can be either on-premise and through the Cloud, as Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS).  Increasingly, DaaS offerings such as Amazon Workspaces are becoming more enterprise ready and promise to deliver desktops in a “whenever, wherever” fashion (and, as I’ve posted about before, a good search experience will be crucial to getting the most out of DaaS).

That Search 8 Virtual Edition helps enable an optimal experience with desktop virtualization and DaaS is a great thing, but the value does not stop there.  The same concept – allowing the index to be decoupled from the client interface – will enable great search experiences for mobile, which is the next big stomping ground for enterprise IT.  And, X1 is the only search vendor providing this capability.  We know that the concept of the desktop could live anywhere.  And, our customers want to be able to use X1 Search 8 even if they are unable to have a local index on their machine or device.

The term “desktop search” is already out there and meaningful to many people, so it’s not about changing what we call this market.  Rather, it’s about changing the mindset – realizing that the desktop is not just the screen on your PC, but rather the gateway to all of your important information needed to do your job.

 

 

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June 24, 2014 · 9:49 AM

With Search, What Are We Looking For?

by Barry Murphy
Needle haystack

Recently, I was contacted by an X1 user and fan and he asked me, “why isn’t X1 more famous?”  His point was that X1 Search 8 solves a problem that every company has – people can’t find their information.  They are unable to find that one email or document that they know exists, but that they just can’t remember where they put it.  This X1 fan happens to be a consultant that works with many, many companies and reported that, no matter what client he visits, all have workers that constantly complain about not being able to find what they are looking for.

It can be a marketer’s nightmare to have someone ask why your product is not more famous, but it was a question I had already been giving some thought to.  Part of the challenge when it comes to the “search market” is that most people think of Google when they think of search.  Google is easy to use and helps everyone navigate the Internet much more efficiently.  But, web search is a much different beast than search within a company.  The reality is that 80% of what business workers are looking for exists in their email, file shares, desktop folders, or SharePoint sites.  The worker knows the content exists, has an idea of what he/she is looking for, but simply doesn’t know where it is.  But, when enterprise search solutions were first rolled out, they were built like web search solutions – as if someone wasn’t really sure what they were looking for.

The misperception that the Google search paradigm can apply within the enterprise resulted in enterprise search solutions improperly conflating several search use cases.  But, web search and big data analytics – the new search du jour – are very distinct search types that require features and functions specific to their own unique workflows and use cases. Refashioning big data analytics or web search tools for enterprise search is a recipe for failure and certainly not an end-user driven requirement.

Big Data and the business intelligence (BI) tools built to address Big Data are hot topics.  And BI can deliver some very good information to workers that are managing structured processes.  Every company has deployed some kind of BI tool, but – as our consultant fan let us know – every company still has the problem of business workers not being able to find information.  That is because, when it comes to business worker search, the human brain is the most powerful analytical engine for business productivity search.  Other search solutions have sophisticated algorithms that try to predict things like document taxonomy classifications.   That can be useful at times, but not to enable search for the business worker because the interface and workflow are not designed for business productivity search.  Additionally, analytics-driven solutions require a lot of hardware to make those algorithms churn.

There is a more cost-effective way to solve the problem and ensure that business workers will stop complaining – deploy a search solution with a user-friendly interface that allows humans to use their brain to filter and sort through their information assets.  X1 Search 8 can do that – and do it in today’s virtualized and Cloud-heavy environments.  It is time to realize what business workers are really looking for when they turn to search tools – the one document they know exists that has the information necessary for them to do their jobs in any given moment.

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August 22, 2012 · 5:48 PM

No Legal Duty or Business Reason to Boil the Ocean for eDiscovery Preservation

As an addendum to my previous blog post on the unique eDiscovery and search burdens associated with the de-centralized enterprise, one tactic I have seen attempted by some CIOs to address this daunting challenge is to try to constantly migrate disparate data from around the globe into a central location. Just this past week, I spoke to a CIO that was about to embark on a Quixotic endeavor to centralize hundreds of terabytes of data so that it could be available for search and eDiscovery collection when needed. The CIO strongly believed he had no other choice as traditional information management and electronic discovery tools are not architected and not suited to address large and disparate volumes of data located in hundreds of offices and work sites across the globe that all store information locally. But boiling the ocean through data migration and centralization is extremely expensive, disruptive and frankly unworkable.

Industry analyst Barry Murphy succinctly makes this point:

Centralization runs counter to the realities of the working world where information must be distributed globally across a variety of devices and applications.  The amount of information we create is overwhelming and the velocity with which that information moves increases daily.  To think that an organization can find one system in which to manage all its information is preposterous. At the same time, the FRCPs essentially put the burden on organizations to be accountable for all information, able to conduct eDiscovery on a moment’s notice.  As we’ve seen, the challenge is daunting.

As I wrote earlier this month, properly targeted preservation initiatives are permitted by the courts and can be enabled by effective software that is able to quickly and effectively access and search these data sources throughout the enterprise.  The value of targeted preservation was recognized in the Committee Notes to the FRCP amendments, which urge the parties to reach agreement on the preservation of data and the keywords used to identify responsive materials. (Citing the Manual for Complex Litigation (MCL) (4th) §40.25 (2)).  And In re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, 2007 WL 1655757 (June 5, 2007 E.D.Mo.), 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.”

What is needed to address both eDiscovery and enterprise search 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. 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 de-centralized enterprises to finally address their overseas data in an efficient, expedient, defensible and highly cost-effective manner.

But I am interested in hearing if anyone has had success with the centralization model. In my 12 years in this business and the 8 years before that as a corporate attorney, I have yet to see an effective or even workable situation where a global enterprise has successfully centralized all of their electronically stored information into a single system consisting of hundreds of terabytes. If you can prove me wrong and point to such a verifiable scenario, I’ll buy you a $100 Starbucks gift certificate or a round of drinks for you and your friends at ILTA next week.  If you want to take the challenge of just meet up at ILTA next week in Washington, feel free to email me.

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Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, IaaS, Preservation & Collection

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