Two stakeholder groups insist on having email 'management' systems that act
as the system-of-record (1) IT and (2) attorneys who need to produce emails
as evidence.

IT insists they cannot store everything the user wants stored in the email
system, that only a true email 'management' system stores such high volumes
efficiently. IT says they are tired of making users angry with mailbox
capacity limits.  IT insists that demands to restore emails from backup
tape are needlessly burdensome given that email management systems exist.
IT uses 'backup tape' as the default where there's no email 'management'
system and refuses to destroy 'backup' tapes because they say (1) attorneys
require preservation of tape constantly, that most tapes are part of one
hold or another or even multiple, cascading legal holds, (2) if there are
no holds then there's a retention schedule which requires very long
retention periods - as far back as tapes currently exist - and they don't
have the technology nor the time or expertise to identify and destroy
content on tapes correctly based on intellectual content and the company
retention schedule.

Attorneys insist it's not acceptable to allow users to delete emails from
the email system because then there's an email floating around in the world
beyond the company's control that might surface and work against their
legal strategy. Attorneys say users should not be forced to delete their
emails yet that is the effect of mailbox capacity limits, and they say
users should not be forced to scatter emails across the enterprise in the
form of .pst's, also the effect of mailbox capacity limits. Attorneys say
scattering .pst's creates a different problem requiring more resources to
be deployed by a different IT silo  (IT Security) to collect the scattered
.pst's, which is an activity the must be done because attorneys are
required to make good faith efforts to search all sources and locations for
responsive evidence, and testify that they did so on penalty of perjury and
everyone in IT and legal knows that employees scatter .pst's like squirrels
burying nuts. Attorneys say collecting scattered .pst's, is more burdensome
than having a single repository  'system of record' already in place.
Attorneys say finding a place to do their search and review - a place
without capacity limits - is also a burden. Attorneys say that starting the
review and production of emails with an incomplete collection of records is
higher risk than performing additional filtering on search results.

On the other hand, today's search and discovery tools used by IT Security
to find and collect .pst's are as efficient - and sometimes the same tools
- as what is used to search the email management system. And users complain
to IT about email management systems no matter how 'seamlessly' integrated
with the email transmission system (i.e. Outlook) . Users still find ways
to create and scatter .pst's, , negating storage reduction wins, although
there's no need to collect .pst's outside the email system of record since
they are duplicates.

-- 
Maureen Cusack
San Francisco, CA
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