eDiscovery Part 1 – Lifecycle of an Email Message

Last Friday, September 26, VirtualQube was invited to present at the O365 Nation fall conference in Redmond on the subject of eDiscovery and Organizational Search in Microsoft Office. O365 Nation is a new organization created by our long-time friend Harry Brelsford, the founder of SMB Nation, and, as you might expect, most of the content at the conference was related to Office 365. However, since the eDiscovery and Search tools in question are built into Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, the subject matter of our presentation is equally applicable to on premises deployments of these products.

This is the first of a series of blog posts on this topic, which will include video excerpts from the presentation.

It is important to note that the Microsoft tools discussed here only cover a portion of the Electronically Stored Information (“ESI”) that an organization may be required to produce as part of a discovery action. ESI can include Web content, social media content, videos, voice mails, etc., in addition to the information contained in email and Lync messages, and SharePoint content. The primary purpose of these tools is to enable you to preserve email, Lync, and SharePoint content in its original form, perform integrated searches across all three platforms – plus file shares that are being indexed by SharePoint, and export the results in an industry-standard format that can be ingested into third-party eDiscovery tools for further processing.

Since, by sheer volume, email is likely to be the largest component an organization will have to deal with, this series will begin with a discussion of the lifecycle of an email message in Microsoft Exchange – specifically, what happens to an email message when the user’s “Deleted Items” folder is emptied, and how we can insure that if a user attempts to modify an existing message, a copy of that message in its original form is preserved.