Category Archives: Information Management

December 17, 2024 · 11:06 AM

Inactive Mailboxes, Unlocked: How X1 Enterprise Transforms M365 Data Discovery and Compliance

By Chas Meier and John Patzakis

In today’s compliance-driven environment, organizations must retain, discover, and manage large volumes of email data—even when the employees who once owned that data have long since departed. In Microsoft 365 (M365), this is managed through the concept of “inactive mailboxes.” An inactive mailbox is a mailbox that remains accessible for legal, regulatory, or compliance reasons, but no longer corresponds to an active user. While these preserved data stores are critical for eDiscovery, compliance, and investigations, they can pose significant challenges when it comes to efficiently locating, searching, and collecting the information they contain.

Fortunately, the latest innovations from X1 Enterprise are transforming how organizations handle these inactive mailboxes, making it easier and more streamlined than ever to discover and collect critical information—no matter where it resides.

What Are Inactive Mailboxes in M365?
Inactive mailboxes are mailboxes retained after a user leaves an organization, even after their license is removed. By placing a mailbox on legal hold or under a retention policy before deprovisioning the user, you can preserve it indefinitely without incurring licensing costs. This ensures the data remains accessible for compliance and eDiscovery. Best practices include applying holds before removing accounts, treating inactive mailboxes as part of ongoing governance efforts, and lifting holds once no longer needed.

The Process of Searching Inactive Mailboxes in Purview
In Microsoft Purview (the compliance and security center for Microsoft 365), users granted the eDiscovery manager role and each provisioned with an E5 license can search across both active and inactive mailboxes to fulfill legal or regulatory requirements. Generally, the process involves:

  1. Identifying the Inactive Mailboxes: Administrators must first know which mailboxes are inactive. Inactive mailboxes do not appear in the standard active user lists and often require additional steps to locate—either through the Purview interface, the Microsoft 365 admin center, or by running PowerShell scripts.
  2. Setting Up Permissions and Scope: The person performing the search needs appropriate eDiscovery roles in Purview. Once permissions are granted, they create a new content search or eDiscovery case and include the specific inactive mailboxes in the scope.
  3. Applying Search Criteria: Administrators can filter the search by date, keywords, sender/recipient, or other criteria. After running the search, Purview indexes the content and returns results for review and export.

Why Users Find It Challenging
Users face significant challenges when searching inactive mailboxes due to limited visibility—these mailboxes do not appear with active ones, requiring extra effort to locate and include them. Additionally, complex eDiscovery and compliance roles can be difficult to manage, particularly in organizations with large teams or complicated approval processes. A lack of a unified interface means working across multiple portals, tools, or scripts, leading to a fragmented and easily mismanaged workflow. Finally, without an intuitive, consolidated process, adding inactive mailboxes into search scopes, running queries, and ensuring data completeness is time-consuming and more prone to errors.

As organizations scale and accumulate thousands of these mailboxes, these difficulties multiply. Managing a vast, growing inventory of inactive mailboxes transforms a cumbersome task into a formidable burden, slowing down investigations, audits, and regulatory responses, and increasing the risk of overlooking critical data.

Many organizations resort to re-hydrating inactive mailboxes by applying an active M365 license to each one (“throwing licensing”), copying all M365 mailboxes of departed employees in a separate non-Microsoft archive (“throwing archiving”), or bringing inactive mailboxes into the litigation workflow (“throwing services”) to address the problem when faced with eDiscovery requests. Each of these approaches is extremely expensive, burdensome, and fraught with risk.

Driving the Transformation of Inactive Mailboxes through New Capabilities
X1 Enterprise has long been a trusted solution for comprehensive and targeted search across M365 data sources, file servers, and endpoints. With the new release of X1 Enterprise version 5.3, X1 is taking an industry-leading step forward in how organizations manage and leverage their inactive mailboxes.

How X1 Enterprise Revolutionizes Inactive Mailbox Management:

  • Unified Discovery Experience: With X1 Enterprise 5.3, legal and compliance professionals can now select inactive mailboxes directly within the platform. Instead of treating inactive mailboxes as separate or isolated repositories, X1 provides a consistent, familiar interface—just like working with active mailboxes.
  • Centralized Indexing and Search: Once selected, inactive mailboxes can be staged, indexed, searched, and collected using the same intuitive workflows. This streamlines eDiscovery, ensures rapid insights, and reduces the administrative burden on IT and compliance teams.
  • Seamless Integration with Microsoft Purview: X1 Enterprise automatically discovers and presents your full list of inactive mailboxes stored in Microsoft Purview (formerly Office 365 Security & Compliance Center) using only a single E5 license. This direct integration ensures that all preserved mailboxes are readily visible and actionable.
  • Consistent Identification and Collection Workflows: By applying the same workflows to both active and inactive mailboxes, X1 Enterprise eliminates confusion and complexity. The result is a more efficient and effective approach to responding to legal requests, regulatory audits, and internal investigations.

Benefits of the New Approach:

  1. Faster Response Times: Legal and compliance teams can rapidly identify and collect relevant information from inactive mailboxes without reinventing the wheel for each scenario.
  2. Improved Efficiency: In-place indexing and targeted searching with X1 Enterprise reduces administrative overhead and streamlines processes without the need to “boil the ocean,” thereby vastly reducing licensing costs with no need for 3rd party services or archiving platforms.
  3. Reduced Risk: Consistent workflows lower the chance of missing critical data or mismanaging preserved mailboxes.
  4. Enhanced Transparency: Having a clear, uniform process for both active and inactive mailboxes bolsters your overall information governance framework.

In Conclusion: Embrace the Future of Inactive Mailbox Management
Inactive mailboxes are here to stay, as legal and regulatory requirements continue to mandate the preservation of key business communications. Instead of viewing these repositories as a burden, forward-thinking organizations can leverage advanced technologies like X1 Enterprise 5.3 to take control of their compliance landscape.

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, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection

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October 29, 2024 · 10:54 AM

Microsoft Copilot Explains Why X1 Search is Far Better than Windows Search

By Chas Meier

We’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI chat bot. So, we asked Copilot the following prompt:

“Is X1 Search better than the standard Windows Search?

Here is Copilot’s reply in full:

“Yes, X1 Search offers many advantages over standard Windows Search, especially if you’re dealing with large volumes of documents and emails. It integrates with multiple data sources, provides faster and more efficient searches, and offers advanced filtering and preview options that standard Windows Search lacks. For someone in your line of work, X1 Search could be a real game-changer.”

Intrigued, we explored further:

“What are the advantages of X1 search over standard Windows search?

Copilot:

“Great question! Here are some key advantages of X1 Search over standard Windows Search:

  1. Unified Search Across Multiple Data Sources: X1 Search can search across emails, documents, local files, cloud storage (like Google Drive, OneDrive, Box), and even archived emails. Windows Search, on the other hand, is limited to your local files and doesn’t integrate as seamlessly with cloud services.
  2. Speed and Efficiency: X1 Search uses advanced indexing and fast-as-you-type search capabilities, allowing you to find information almost instantly. Windows Search can be slower, especially when dealing with large volumes of data.
  3. Advanced Filtering and Preview Options: X1 Search offers powerful filtering options, keyword highlighting, and full fidelity previews of documents and emails without needing to open them fully. This makes it easier to quickly identify relevant information. Windows Search lacks these advanced features.
  4. Integration with Email and Collaboration Tools: X1 Search integrates deeply with email clients like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, allowing you to search through emails, attachments, chats, and more. Windows Search doesn’t offer this level of integration.
  5. Cloud Data Search: X1 Search can index and search data stored in cloud repositories like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box, which Windows Search doesn’t support.
  6. User Friendly Interface: X1 Search provides a simple, unified interface with over 50 refine columns, making it easy to navigate and find exactly what you need. Windows Search’s interface is more basic and less intuitive.

Does this help clarify the advantages for you?”

Yes, it does! Thank you, Microsoft Copilot! We could not have said it any better.

X1 Search is available for individual purchase on the X1 website and large volume, enterprise purchase by contacting X1 at sales@x1.com. To learn more about X1 Search visit  www.x1.com/solutions/x1-search.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Desktop Search, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Google Workspace, Hybrid Search, Information Access, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, SharePoint, X1 Search 9

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August 6, 2024 · 10:04 AM

Granting Microsoft 365 Super-Admin Privileges to eDiscovery Service Providers is Very Risky and Unnecessary

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

In a world where data breaches are not just possible but expected, securing sensitive information becomes paramount. However, in many cases, organizations are unnecessarily handing over the security keys to the kingdom to eDiscovery Service Providers by providing them with very heightened security privileges to their Microsoft 365 tenants. This is because the more manual methods relied on by service providers often involve gaining high-level permissions usually only reserved for senior trusted IT directors and executives within the client organization. Such broad access can lead to unauthorized data access, including creating new accounts for others outside the organization, data overcollection, and unintended data modifications and even deletions. These unnecessary accommodations can cause severe irreversible damage, security breaches and overall complication with compliance efforts.

Clients are often told such high-level security access is absolutely necessary. In truth, service providers only resort to such measures when they fail to utilize best practices technology. In many cases, service providers, once they gain elevated administrative permissions, simply run basic scripts that they position as proprietary, which have little functionality other than the bulk download of M365 data. These scripts only work if very high-level access is granted to the user of the scripts. Once the service provider completes their mass data download from M365, they are off to the races with their traditional highly lucrative eDiscovery workflows of excessive data volumes due to overcollection, extensive processing and project management, and final eventual staging into review, all leading to excessive costs and unnecessarily extended timelines.

In contrast, our customers believe X1’s strategy for M365 Data Access is unique and disruptive to legacy approaches still utilized by many service providers. We designed our approach to maximize security, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure economic advantages for our clients, setting new benchmarks that challenge conventional industry practices.

  1. Uncompromised Security with Read-Only Access
    X1’s approach to accessing client information in a read-only least privileged manner exemplifies our commitment to security. In our approach a client grants read-only permissions to the X1 Enterprise solution licensed and controlled by the client, through an application that also remains under the control of our client and has a built-in expiration. No X1 employee ever needs to have access to or personally utilize the client’s M365 credentials. There is no ability for X1 to create new accounts or even delegate M365 permissions. This approach eliminates the risks associated with more invasive access levels that other eDiscovery providers often require.

    X1’s methodology ensures that the data remains pristine and untouched throughout the eDiscovery process. This approach not only supports stringent compliance with legal and regulatory standards but also shields organizations from the pitfalls of unauthorized data manipulation. It significantly reduces the potential for costly security incidents, reinforcing the trust our clients place in us to handle their most sensitive information.

  2. Index-in-Place: Elevating Data Integrity and Efficiency
    Our “index-in-place” technology stands in stark contrast to the traditional data extraction methods employed by many service providers. These providers often relocate substantial data volumes from clients’ M365 tenants to their environments—a practice driven by the desire to increase hosting volumes and, consequently, revenue. This not only introduces significant security risks but also strains client resources and infrastructure.

    By indexing data directly within its native environment, X1 maintains the integrity and security of the data. This approach significantly reduces the exposure of data to external threats during transfer and storage. It also enhances the speed and accuracy of search and collection processes, enabling quicker responses to legal inquiries and reducing the overall time and cost of eDiscovery.

    Moreover, this method highlights our principle of avoiding the “fox guarding the henhouse” scenario, where providers have incentives that might conflict with client interests. Our clients appreciate the transparency and integrity of keeping their data within their controlled environment, free from unnecessary external manipulation or exposure.

  3. Transparent Pricing Promoting Efficiency and Reuse
    X1’s innovative pricing model stands out by encouraging the efficient reuse of tools without penalizing clients for data volume. This approach directly contrasts with the common industry practice where costs escalate with the volume of data hosted or processed. Our pricing structure is designed to align closely with our clients’ needs for predictable and reasonable costs.

    By not charging based on data volume, we foster a more sustainable and rational use of resources, allowing our clients to plan and budget more effectively. This pricing strategy supports not just cost savings but also promotes a more strategic use of eDiscovery tools, encouraging practices that are both economically and environmentally more sustainable.

Conclusion
X1 is dedicated to setting a higher standard for secure, efficient, and cost-effective data management solutions in Microsoft 365 environments. Our innovative approaches to read-only access, index-in-place technology, and volume-independent pricing ensure that our clients receive unparalleled service that prioritizes their security, operational efficiency, and financial well-being.

We invite you to join us in this transformative journey and experience the peace of mind that comes from knowing your data remains in place until you target a collection to migrate into review. 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/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, compliance, Cybersecurity, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Information Access, Information Management, m365

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April 9, 2024 · 10:53 AM

New X1 Search 9 Provides the Best Means to Search Your Microsoft 365 Data Sources

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

Last week X1 announced major new, robust features to our desktop productivity solution X1 Search. The next generation of X1 Search is no longer desktop-only focused, but instead provides a revolutionary ability to instantly search across your Microsoft email, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint as well as your local files and email all in a single unified search. This powerful capability supercharges your productivity, thereby saving hours a day. This added support also extends to Google Drive and Gmail.

While there are many innovations with X1 Search 9, the ability to search across all your M365 data sources with a single search is particularly game changing. No other enterprise or desktop search solution can match this functionality. The native Microsoft M365 search has a semblance of this, offering only a few search results displayed with a cursory preview, as opposed to full search results and full fidelity preview provided by X1.

“X1 Search is my go-to, must-have search application on my desktop,” said Max Underwood, long-time business and personal user from a large defense contracting firm. “Nothing even comes close to matching X1 Search’s speed and accuracy in finding what I am looking for exactly when I need it so I can get back to work, whether the source file is located on my local drive or hosted on a distant cloud via my company’s network. It’s an incredible time-saver, invaluable, way ahead of Windows Search or any other search tool I’ve seen – literally saving me hours each work week. X1 Search is essential to my day-to-day operations, and with the new ability to instantly search across all my Teams messages and accelerate my Gmail search on top of the current capabilities, the solution is even more compelling.”

No other solution enables you to instantly search across all your core data applications using a single prompt and return immediate results with hit highlighting and full fidelity preview capabilities. X1 Search unlocks the ability to find information no matter where it resides whether it’s lost in your spam folder, archived in your email 10 years ago, buried in a Teams chat or recently added to your OneDrive or SharePoint. X1 Search does the work for you, faster and far better than any other desktop or enterprise search offering.

The new X1 Search version 9 capabilities, include the following benefits:

• The ability to search through all your Microsoft Teams Chats and Channels history, including messages, attachments, emojis, reactions, and more, all from a single interface.
• Elevate your cloud data search capabilities with the new Google drive connector enabling you to search your complete Google drive history and immediately perform Post Search Actions.
• Index, search and find information in your Gmail 3 times faster with the new API-based Gmail connector.
• Patented fast-as-you-type search with built-in hit highlighting and full fidelity preview for immediate visibility into your results.
• Search across all your Outlook email, attachments, Outlook calendar, and contacts list via X1’s deep Outlook integration.
• Unified search across all your data sources to instantly search and find emails, attachments, documents, local files, and M365 data in a single search.
• Accelerate your email workflow with M365 Archived mail search capabilities – Rapidly index years’ worth of archived Outlook email in half the time.

X1 will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, April 17 introducing the game-changing, new solution capabilities now available with X1 Search version 9.

The X1 Search solution is available for individual purchase on the X1 website and large volume, enterprise purchase by contacting X1 at sales@x1.com. To learn more about X1 Search visit www.x1.com/products/x1-search

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Corporations, Desktop Search, Enterprise Search, ESI, Hybrid Search, Information Management, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, Records Management, SharePoint, X1 Search 9

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February 27, 2024 · 11:38 AM

Modern, Targeted ESI Collection Can Cut eDiscovery Costs by Over 90 Percent

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

eDiscovery can be an expensive and time-consuming process when traditional data collection methods are employed. With legacy processes, it can take weeks for electronically stored information (ESI) collections to finally end up in review. Time is money, and utilizing dated processes can dramatically increase costs as well as risk. One of the biggest drivers of excessive eDiscovery costs is over-collection of irrelevant or unnecessary information. This in turn leads to a larger amount of data entering the processing and initial review funnel.

In fact, old school manual collection efforts require employing multiple tools, data copies, and manual steps into your litigation workflow. The majority of ESI processing consists of data culling and filtering, deduplication, text extraction, metadata preservation, and then staging the data for upload into a review platform, often in the form of a load (DAT) file. Some ESI processing solutions require deployment of non-integrated on-premise hardware appliances that further increase costs and add time delays. Manual collections, multiple generations of data duplication, and disjointed handoffs exponentially increase costs and risk while significantly delaying documents being available for review.

If you are still using stand-alone processing tools, you are doing it wrong and subjecting your clients to extensive costs and time delays. Modern collection technologies combine targeted collection with in-place processing of data which is automatically collected, processed, and uploaded into a review platform such as Relativity in one fell swoop.

The graph below established that the cost for collection, processing and first month hosting under a traditional preservation process can be upwards of $12,000 per custodian:

Properly targeted preservation initiatives are favored by the courts for purposes of civil eDiscovery and enabled by next generation software to search data sources quickly and effectively in-place throughout the enterprise. The value of targeted and proportional preservation is recognized in the Committee Notes to the recent FRCP amendments, which urge the parties to reach agreement on the preservation of data, keywords, and other metadata to identify responsive materials. See also, In re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, (“Preservation 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.”)

X1 Enterprise Collect significantly streamlines the eDiscovery workflow with integrated culling and deduplication, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome ESI processing tools. That way, the ESI can be populated straight into Relativity from an X1 collection without multiple hand offs, extensive project management and inefficient data processing.

The ability to directly and transparently collect data from custodian laptops, desktops, Microsoft 365 and other cloud sources into a RelativityOne / Relativity workspace is a game-changer that enables Attorney’s to begin review in hours rather than weeks.

The second chart shows how this streamlined approach, based upon a detailed ROI analysis, reduces eDiscovery costs by over 90 percent:

So, in terms of the big picture, X1 Enterprise Collect provides a complete platform to implement a properly targeted preservation strategy in the enterprise enabling organizations to save a lot of time, save a lot of money, and be able to make faster and better decisions.

When you accelerate the speed to review and eliminate over-collection and inefficient processing, you gain much better early insight into your data and can increase efficiencies on many levels.

Finally, the calculations represented in the charts were generated from a customizable ROI cost calculator created by Chas Meier, based upon his more than 20 years’ experience in eDiscovery service provider roles. If you would like a copy of this ROI calculator, please contact Chas at CMeier@x1.com.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Information Management, Preservation & Collection

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