Kroll Ontrack Inc. has updatedone of its flagship e-discovery and data management products to include newfeatures aimed at simplifying legal hold notification, archiving MicrosoftSharePoint content, and reducing discovery processing times.
The Minneapolis-basedorganization, which operates as the technology services division for riskconsulting firm Kroll Inc., said the updated Ontrack Compass v2.1 includes manyfeatures that are in high demand from enterprise IT and legal teams. Theinitial version of the software was launched in January.
The enterprise archiving platformwas developed for use with Microsoft Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes and is designedto manage and locate electronic documents, administer legal holds and automatedocument retention processes.
New to this update is a MicrosoftOffice SharePoint Server and instant messaging archive capability. The companysaid that because these tools are gaining widespread use for collaboration andcommunication purposes, legal and IT teams have been forced to archive thistype of data during many e-discovery cases.
“In general, SharePoint is thefastest growing content source in an organization,” said Tom McCaffrey, directorof archiving for Kroll Ontrack.
In addition to SharePoint and IMarchiving, the company also added a feature its calling “custodian-folderedoutput.” McCaffrey said that most archives do not allow for pinpointedcustodian-level output.
Typically, he said, filteringdown a data set leaves legal and IT teams with one big block of data. Thisusually forces enterprises have to send the exported data to an externale-discovery provider to manually reorganize the data by custodian, he added.
“We find that almost half of thetime (for legal teams) is spent organizing the data by custodian,” he said.
With the new Ontrack Compassfeature, McCaffrey said the software will automatically group relevante-discovery by custodian. He said this alone will cut discovery processingtimes by 50 per cent.
The final significant addition tothe software includes a major improvement to the legal hold notificationfunctionality. McCaffrey said that the long an organization waits to issue alegal hold, the greater the risk they’ll lose that data.
Kroll Ontrack’s new feature willallow users to generate and manage legal holds from within the archivingsoftware.
The e-discovery and data preservation market has been fairlyactive in North America recently as largeenterprises across a variety of verticals look to stay prepared in the event ofstiff regulations or unexpected litigation.
Some of these tools are even being taken to the cloud.
Earlier this year, two cloud-based providers teamed up to createan e-mail preservation and compliance tool aimed at organizations who want tobe prepared in the event of e-discovery.
LiveOffice LLC’s cloud-based LiveOffice Discovery Archivetool — which stores and indexes e-mail, attachments, instant messaging conversationsand BlackBerry messages for e-discovery or HR requests — agreed to offerZapproved Inc.’s Legal Hold Pro functionality. The new feature aimed toautomate the way LiveOffice users manage and issue legal hold notifications.
Brian Babineau, a senior consulting analyst with EnterpriseStrategy Group Inc., said that simply identifying relevant e-mail prior tolitigation is no longer sufficient. Organizations actually have to preservethis e-mail and notify affected employees that the data is being placed on alegal hold.
“Large enterprises may have the internal IT resources to runa compliant messaging infrastructure in-house, but mid-size and smallerorganizations sure don’t,” he said. “And these organizations still have toabide by record retention and discovery regulations.”
