SharePoint Staking Its Claim as the Next eDiscovery Pain Point

When businesses think of Microsoft, it is not just Windows, Office or Internet Explorer that comes to mind. Increasingly it's SharePoint that they identify as one of Microsoft's most compelling solutions. Using a drive letter path for document collaboration is no longer practical in this day and age and SharePoint is now the tool to which many organizations turn to fill their collaboration needs. So while SharePoint fills this new need for many organizations, what is not so obvious to them is how to manage SharePoint so they can search, find and deliver relevant documents in a timely manner if faced with an eDiscovery request.

A recent New York Times article illustrates the dramatic rise in SharePoint's market penetration as it now has over 17,000 customer installs and over $1 billion in revenue. This cements the claims that SharePoint is now one of Microsoft's flagship product and is fast achieving the same type of broad corporate acceptance that its Windows, Office and Exchange products already have. So as SharePoint continues its ascent and companies increasingly use SharePoint to store and manage documents, it creates new eDiscovery complexities for which organizations need to account.

When an eDiscovery request or legal hold for electronically stored information (ESI) is presented to an organization, it becomes painfully obvious that documents germane to the legal action are scattered across its network. While email is always an area of immediate attention, much progress has already occurred in that arena. Now SharePoint is staking its claim as the new corporate eDiscovery pain point. Therefore it is imperative that organizations come to grips with this issue and learn how to manage their SharePoint repository.

Archiving is often viewed as invaluable when it comes to eDiscovery for its ability to store unstructured data in a structured manner and make it searchable. This technique has worked well for email and it only stands to reason that the time has time to archive data within SharePoint's repositories as well.

However as organizations look to do that, using software that archives and centrally manages data for all of their unstructured and semi-structured data stores becomes more important to implement to meet constantly emerging corporate eDiscovery, legal and search requests. The value that using tools like Symantec's Enterprise Vault provides include:

• Acts as a central repository. Archiving data from multiple unstructured and semi-structured data stores that may include email, file stores, instant messaging, SharePoint and even other data sources is invaluable when it comes to performing eDiscoveries. Software such as Enterprise Vault further helps in this initiative by structuring the data so it is easier to perform eDiscoveries since metadata is created and preserved across all of these different data types.
• Eases retention policy management. Enterprise Vault provides a means for deletion of documents. Being able to ensure that documents are deleted in a timely manner so as to show a routine maintenance of your information system is critical for "safe harbor" in an eDiscovery case. Often it is difficult to ensure and enforce the timely deletion of documents as mandated by company policy. Enterprise Vault deletes documents based on defined retention policies thus ensuring routine maintenance is performed and policy enforcement is carried out.
• Put a legal hold across content sources. Organizations should have the flexibility to put legal holds on content no matter what the data's source is (file server, instant messaging, email etc.) Using multiple archiving tools or disparate management policies makes this difficult to implement and enforce. Organizations that use software such as Enterprise Vault ease the management of multiple data sources since it manages documents within a central repository. This ensures legal holds are consistently done across all relevant documents without fear of missing important and relevant documents.

SharePoint is gaining momentum as a corporate collaboration tool at an exponential pace but history shows once again that no matter where data is stored, proper management of it does not occur by accident. SharePoint provides organizations with many advantages but it also creates new data management issues for which they need to account as no companies get a free pass any longer at either the state or federal level when important and relevant ESI are not held or presented in a court case.

Courts are becoming intolerant of eDiscovery missteps or mistakes and fines and penalties can be crippling to a company's case and/or bottom line. Only through the use of products such as Symantec's Enterprise Vault can companies be assured documents critical to an eDiscovery request can be searched and managed for legal hold obligations.

Archiving continues to serve email well but eDiscovery is now going beyond traditional email and needs to extend its reach into new storage repositories like SharePoint. So it only makes sense for organization to leverage products like Enterprise Vault that can take what it has learned with email archive to the next level and provide organizations a common, centralized way to manage and search data across all of their archived data stores.