May 20, 2014 · 8:28 AM

SharePoint Search: Beyond eDiscovery

by Barry Murphy

I had the pleasure of conducting a SharePoint eDiscovery webinar with Patrick Burke of Reed Smith for the OLP last week.  The subject is fascinating because finding, preserving, and reviewing SharePoint content in the litigation/investigation context can be so challenging.  The metadata users add to content (e.g. workflow tasks), the web page interface that creates more native ESI than just a document, and the decentralization of SharePoint deployments make eDiscovery for SharePoint a topic unto itself.  Often lost in this topic is the issue of end-user search of SharePoint.

When I talk about end-user search in SharePoint, most people just assume that the search functionality baked in to the product (Microsoft acquired FAST Search & Transfer several years back) is enough.  In some cases, that will be correct, but in others it does not work to give business users efficient access to information.  Some companies have standardized on SharePoint as an enterprise content management (ECM) platform while others have some departments that use SharePoint for sharing files and managing specific business processes.  In either situation, the reality is that business workers store information in multiple places – SharePoint, email, network file shares, etc.  To find that information is often a frustrating task of switching from application to application only to have a subpar search experience.

Consider the screenshot below of a search experience in SharePoint:

SharePoint blog 1

Click to enlarge

The experience leaves something to be desired in that I have to execute several more clicks on the left to do any kind of filtering and, in the result set itself, it is very difficult to know if any of these are the document I am looking for because I can’t see the document itself.  I would need to open it first.  In addition, as a business worker, I probably don’t know if I should be looking in email, file shares, or SharePoint for the document I need.  I know I saw it somewhere, but can’t remember where.  In this search experience, if I don’t find what I am looking for in SharePoint, I now have to go search my email and then my file system.  It adds up to a waste of time.

Now, consider a unified, single-pane-of-glass approach:

SharePoint blog 2

Click to enlarge

In this user interface, I can search across email, files, and SharePoint.  I can see a full-fidelity preview of the attachment.  I can refine on any kind of metadata.  It is a positive search experience that is helpful and allows me to be efficient.  More and more people realize now that this unified access to information is critically important. That may be why SharePoint guru Joel Oleson said, after a X1 Search 8 product demo, “the great news is seeing unified search across the variety of platforms [email, file shares, SharePoint] in a single powerful desktop product priced very reasonably.”  It’s because business workers really do need that unified interface across all information.  To be forced to move from email to SharePoint just to run a search can be frustrating and time consuming.  For SharePoint administrators, not having to worry about a user’s search experience in SharePoint is liberating.  When business workers and IT administrators are both happy, the world is a better place.

Read Joel Oleson’s complete review of X1 Search 8 here >

 

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May 13, 2014 · 8:58 AM

Citrix Synergy Conference: It’s About User Experience

by Barry Murphy

Citrix-Synergy-2014-300x165I had the pleasure of attending the Citrix Synergy event in Anaheim, CA.
Thanks to our partner Citrix for putting on a world-class event with excellent sessions, interesting labs, a comfortable exhibition area, and some great parties.  Of note was the party put on by the M7 Global Partners that featured an in-demand cigar bar and a rocking performance by Thundherstruck, the female AC/DC tribute band.  The Synergy conference was truly a great experience.

Experience was the theme of the week; user experience, that is.  As Citrix CEO Mark B. Templeton said in his opening keynote, “it’s all about being happy.”  In order for business workers to be happy, the IT systems they leverage must not be a source of frustration.

Citrix understands that, in order for IT projects to achieve success, business workers need an experience that will allow them to not only adopt, but embrace the solutions IT teams roll out.  A good user experience is necessary for both business workers and IT.  More than ever, IT teams need to control costs while also accounting for security.  The challenge for IT is doing this in the context of the consumerization of IT.  Business workers have very high expectations of being able to access and interact with information on the devices they want, where they want.  In an increasingly mobile world, virtualization is one way to securely deliver applications and information to business workers.

To that end, Citrix showed how it aims to deliver usable solutions such as XenApp, XenDesktop, and DaaS.  Business workers will be able to access desktops and applications when and where they need them.  And, with ShareFile, IT will have a solution that allows for on-premise, Cloud, and hybrid storage environments – that is a powerful way to save money while maintaining tight security requirements.

What Citrix customers and prospects will want to remember is that one key to making virtualization and hybrid Cloud solutions work is a good productivity search (the ability for workers to easily find the information they need to do their jobs) experience for business workers.  Desktop virtualization requires turning off operating system indexing in order to conserve virtual resources – that makes productivity search impossible without a solution like X1 Search 8 Virtual Edition that decouples indexing services from the client search interface that lives on the desktop.

It is the cloud search and hybrid environment search, too, that are key to making projects successful in today’s IT departments.  Organizations store information on-premise and in the cloud and need to be able to search across all of that information.  A majority of the cloud search solutions on the market today require downloading the content from the cloud in order to index and search it, which defeats the purpose of putting the content in the cloud in the first place.  It is not just cloud search – it is the ability to search across data both on-premise and in the cloud, as X1 Rapid Discovery can do, that is required in today’s fast-paced, information-fueled business world.

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Aside

Evidentiary Challenges to Social Media Evidence Now Routine When Best Practices Not Utilized

by John Patzakis

This past month of April saw a surge in case law involving social media cases with 112 cases published on Westlaw, representing a substantial increase from January of this year. There is no question that the volume of social media cases continues to rapidly increase each month. Note that this survey group only involves published cases on Westlaw. With less than one percent of total cases resulting in published opinions, and considering this data set does not take into account internal or compliance investigations or non-filed criminal cases, we can safely assume that there were tens of thousands more legal matters involving social media evidence that were adjudicated, or otherwise resolved last month alone.

What I found particularly compelling about these 112 April cases, is that six of those cases involved evidentiary challenges to social media based upon improper foundation and authentication grounds. Specifically, those cases are:

1. Smith v. State, Supreme Court of Mississippi, April 17, 2014, 2014 WL 15113032.

2. People v. Anderson, Court of Appeals, Michigan, April 08, 2014, 2014 WL 13833993.

3. Randazza v. Cox, U.S. District Court, Nevada, April 10, 2014, 2014 WL 1407378

4. People v. Isom, Court of Appeals, Michigan, April 22, 2014, 2014 WL 1614536

5. Nastatos v. State, Supreme Court of Delaware, April 15, 2014, 2014 WL 1512887

6. Krylova v. Genentech Inc., U.S. District Court, N.D. California. April 14, 2014, 2014 WL 1478698

In People v. Anderson, the defendant appealed his sexual conviction for sexual assault by asserting ineffective assistance of counsel, due to his counsel’s failure to object when screenshots – not full electronic copies – of Facebook evidence were used to convict him. Specifically, the defendant contended that the metadata from his alleged Facebook messages would have revealed that the victim actually used passwords she stole from defendant’s home to forge the Facebook messages from defendant on her own electronic devices, and thus was provided ineffective counsel by failing to object accordingly at trial.

In the first case listed, Smith v. State, the Defendant’s sole basis for appealing his capital murder conviction was that the prosecution’s Facebook evidence consisting of simple screen prints was not property authenticated. The Mississippi Supreme court noted in its decision that the prosecution offered minimal circumstantial evidence to establish the authenticity of the Facebook pages and no evidence to demonstrate that the photos were not altered.  However, in upholding the conviction, the court ultimately determined that direct evidence testimony in that case was sufficient.

These cases, along with Commonwealth v. Banas, which we featured last month, where a Massachusetts court disallowed Facebook screenshots on authentication grounds,  illustrate the perils of relying on mere printouts of key social media evidence. Without utilizing best practices and instead relying on mere screen prints of social media and other website evidence, at best a party faces a court challenge that would require up to tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees to defend. At worst, the evidence may be disallowed, which could very well be dispositive of the case or at least severely impair a party’s position.

The much better approach is for the proponent of social media evidence to collect and preserve such evidence with best practices technology to establish a proper foundation by 1) automatically generating MD5 hash values of the evidence and collection logs including date stamps at the time of collection; 2) collecting all available metadata associated with social media items; and 3) collecting the full account as opposed to limited and incomplete segments. Only with this approach can the proponent of the evidence represent that best practices were employed in the collection and preservation of the social media evidence in question.

 

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May 6, 2014 · 8:37 AM
April 29, 2014 · 9:25 AM

As Desktop-as-a-Service Gains Traction, Do Not Overlook Productivity Search

by Barry Murphy

Oftentimes, federal government agency IT departments are technology early adopters because of mandates to cut costs and increase efficiencies and business agility. It is not surprising, then, to see FCW.com pointing out that agencies are embracing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Benefits of VDI include simpler and more automated systems administration, better control over security (always a big factor for government agencies), and lower costs for client-side support. Those “hard” benefits are only part of the story – VDI also enables worker mobility (especially important to the Department of Energy) and helps enable more “green IT.” Because VDI provides a zero client environment, it can reduce the required power consumption per desktop, thereby reducing the environmental impact of the agency’s IT systems. This is perhaps more of a soft benefit, but a necessary one nonetheless.

As the FCW article states, there are now two options for deploying VDI: on-premise and through the Cloud, as Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS). There are good market options in both directions, with on-premise providers like Citrix and VMWare, and DaaS providers such as Amazon (with its Workspaces offering) and the aforementioned VMWare (with its Horizon offering). Whichever direction an organization chooses for its VDI, it is critical to remember that business worker adoption and acceptance is the key to ROI. In my experience, one thing that scares business workers when moving to VDI is the potential loss of easy access to their information assets. With VDI, it is a best practice to turn off Windows indexing, and that can leave a business worker without the ability to search for his or her information.

DaaS

With VDI in the Cloud, the DaaS provider will want to manage virtual computing resources diligently – also meaning that desktop indexing will likely be turned off. And with government agencies increasingly storing information in the Cloud, it can make search of that data a challenge. There is an opportunity to ensure a better business worker transition in these environments – build in productivity search requirements up front. Business worker access to information is an important component of easing any kind of end-user angst when transitioning to a new desktop environment. Providing these workers with unified access to common information like email, files, and SharePoint will help with change management and user acceptance. And it is important to stress again – without the end-users, there is no ROI on these VDI projects. Therefore, the upfront productivity search requirements should include a search solution that supports VDI environments and that is deployable in the Cloud, like X1 Rapid Discovery.

The move is on to VDI in the federal government, and industries like financial services and professional services are also in the midst of VDI roll-outs. These early adopters will set the trend of many industries. If the early adopters require excellent business worker productivity search experiences, acceptance of these new technologies will be much smoother and more successful. And that is good for everyone – VDI vendors and customers.

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April 22, 2014 · 9:26 AM

Cloud Search Is Important, But Only A Piece Of The Enterprise Search Puzzle

by Barry Murphy

In an earlier post, I described the importance of having the ability to quickly search for information stored in the Cloud.  The post pointed out that Cloud search is somewhat more complicated than one might think at first glance because the speed of search is affected by how close the index lives to the actual data in the Cloud infrastructure.  One comment I received was that Cloud search can be fast and simple if the Cloud vendor promises a certain service level for query times and results.  That can address part of the issue around search (although IaaS providers – what we are truly talking about when we say “Cloud” – are typically not interested in guaranteeing SLAs for things like search because they allow customers to provision their infrastructure set to enable fast search with products like X1 Rapid Discovery).  Even if a Cloud vendor were to guarantee phenomenal search SLAs, the issue of unified enterprise search of all information still remains.

The reality is that enterprises and government agencies store information in “hybrid” environments that encompass on-premise systems within corporate data centers, virtualized systems that companies operate, and Cloud-based repositories.  Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of mainstream enterprises will have a hybrid cloud.  And, research from NetApp shows that organizations will be managing data across multiple cloud environments, not just a single provider, per se.

Click image to enlarge

Click image to enlarge

These are exciting developments.  As organizations embrace more modern infrastructures, there are many benefits to be had.  What we need to remember, however, is that business professionals still need to quickly find and take action on their information assets to do their jobs.  As that information gets further scattered, enterprise search will take on increased importance.  Workers don’t care if their data is stored on-premise or in the Cloud as long as they can quickly find it in an easy-to-use interface.

The challenge for today’s organizations is that information now lives in multiple infrastructures – on-premise, virtual, Cloud, or most frequently, a hybrid of all of these.  Current approaches to including Cloud-based data in enterprise search and eDiscovery require downloading a copy of the data to search so that it resides alongside other local content.  Unfortunately, that defeats the purpose of storing the data in the Cloud in the first place.

This takes me back to my original point:  Cloud search is very important.  But, Cloud search cannot simply exist in a vacuum.  An effective enterprise search solution will combine on-premise search capabilities that can talk to search in the Cloud – without requiring downloading the cloud-based information in order to search across all data.

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