Of mice, men, and social eDiscovery

Today’s post comes from Norv Leong, Director of Product Marketing at Actiance.

Having just returned from the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat in lovely Monterey, California (author John Steinbeck’s stomping grounds), I walked away with the distinct impression that social media and enterprise collaboration applications were drawing increasingly more attention, both from the courts as well as the other vendors in attendance.

Why is this happening?  Well, there’s growing acceptance that social-type communications are subject to eDiscovery just like other forms of electronic communication (read:  email).  The list of cases involving social media eDiscovery grows longer each month.  All this reflects the growing demand for solutions that can capture social media and collaboration content in a way that preserves the interactive format of sites like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and their brethren.

Capturing social content is one thing but to do so contextually is another.  The importance of context can’t be emphasized enough when it comes to social media and collaboration platforms.  That’s because their very DNA is predicated on constant interaction, be it feedback, replies, sharing, you name it.  You might have ten individuals responding one on top of the other to a provocative blog entry.  If an archiving system were to capture each of the ten persons’ comments individually without tying them back to the original blog entry, you lose all context.

Now, when you toss litigation into the mix, where expensive legal costs and tight deadlines are the norm, well, you can see how having accurate, contextual capture can save lots of time, money, and headaches.  Moreover, having a system in place that can handle a wide range of communications (e.g., instant messages, social media, collaboration, Skype, BlackBerry, and all the rest) brings efficiencies that would otherwise be absent if an organization chose to deploy multiple systems to capture all these different types of communication channels.

Point solutions are becoming too difficult to manage, too expensive, and prone to compatibility issues.  Having a single platform to manage all your communications channels, given all your security and compliance concerns, can certainly restore calm to an otherwise chaotic world of real-time communications.

That kind of simplicity even John Steinbeck would be proud.

What to do with IM & UC management post-Quest?

For those who already utilize tracking, monitoring and control solutions for IM and UC infrastructure, it can be a real blow when you find out that your solution isn’t keeping current, or doesn’t plan to in the future.

In this real-time world, ensuring that your solution maintains the security, management and compliance of these real-time solutions is key to ensuring the future of your business. So what happens when your selected solution doesn’t?

Take the announcement from Quest that Policy Authority for UC has come to end of life and end of support at the end of last year. The hard part for customers is going to be pulling the pieces back together. No doubt you’ve transitioned your entire organization onto a specific platform, now only to find that it’s not keeping up to date with industry changes, or your vendor plans to stop development.

What should you do in that situation?

First, you should identify the timing of the change. Do you have three months or 12 months? Understanding your timeline can help you prioritize your next steps.

The next step is identifying a new partner that you can work with. Here are a few things to look for:

–       Customer churn: How many customers have recently left them to work with a different vendor? This can also be indicative of the type of support you may receive

–       Product roadmap: Has it been a while since they’ve deployed a new version of their solution? Do they support capabilities like Group Chat? Are they compliant with Live Meeting? Do they support the new Microsoft Lync Server?  What about IBM Sametime Advanced? Skype?

–       Company’s primary focus: Is security merely a component of their product offerings? Or, is security, management and compliance for the new Internet their primary focus?

–       Social media capabilities: Do they support the big three (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn)? What are the specific features for each they offer?

–       Partners: Who do they work with to get their updates? Are they members of industry organizations? Do they partner with platforms so they are the most up to date with new product and feature rollouts?

Why not  – if this affects you, join us on one of our webinars, and look at just how easy it is to move!

If there are any doubts in your mind or issues that arise, it’s important to take a closer look at your relationship with this partner and reconsider the engagement.

In this day and age, it’s too easy to miss one update and find your network compromised. It’s critical to partner with a company who will be dedicated to your organization’s safety and success in real time communications – and who makes it their entire business, so that you don’t have to.

Get Federated or Get Obliterated

From Jae Kim – Director of Social Media Products, FaceTime Communications

About fifteen years ago, I was happy with my desktop applications installed. The computer was a glorified calculator, typewriter, and video game machine back then. When I powered up my desktop, I was either going to write quick proof-of-concept Pascal code, type up school reports, or play Doom. All executables and contents that I used were installed on my hard drive. Whenever I wanted to talk to friends, I picked up the landline and called. Whenever I needed references checked, I headed out to the library.

These days, the computer has turned into an all-in-one communications device. When I fire up my laptop, I immediately open my browser, check out the latest tech news on Twitter, read what my friends are up to on Facebook, and respond to emails. No longer do I have to pick up the phone. I just open my IM client to chat with my friends or use Google to look up the answer to any fleeting question that I may have at the moment. I cannot possibly imagine using a computer without a network connection. A computer without an Internet connection is as good as dead weight.

In this post, I would like to make a case that this increasing connectivity is not a trend isolated to computer networks, but applies to social networks as well. The urge to share things and get connected has deeper roots within our human nature. It is something that cannot be ignored and must be harnessed to make the leap into the next stage of networking.

I’ll give a few examples of what it means to technology evolution and how it impacts the adoption of new communications tools. I would argue that the same is true with social media and lay out the likely scenario for social networks to get federated.

For long term viability of social networks as communications platforms, I would argue that social networks must get federated to survive or face the inevitability of obsolescence and eventual obliteration.

1. Internal-Only Email to Email for Everyone

For those of you old enough to remember Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) must have used internal-only email and messaging systems. It used to be that workstations connected to the main server comprised the early intranet. When you wanted to see whether someone was available, you would type ‘finger’ or ‘w’ to see if the other party was online. If so, you were in luck. You could use ‘chat’ to have a real-time chat (what’s known as IM today). If the person was not online, then you had an option to send email using ‘mail’.

As server and workstations became popular, more companies started to adopt these internal-only email systems. Soon, it became obvious to everyone that linking these islands of email services made sense and would create disproportionately more value for everyone. Companies started to federate their email islands to their partners’, accelerating the adoption of the ARPANET mail format.

Some held back saying it would create security concerns in both leaking sensitive information and receiving unwanted files (viruses). Today, no one disputes the value of having a global email system and being connected to it. These concerns were valid, however. People have built solutions around these security issues, and they have given rise to the Data Loss Prevention (DLP), security, and SPAM-filtering industries.

2. AOL – the Walled Garden

America Online (AOL) in the late 1990s was unstoppable. They made the Internet easy for millions by simplifying the technical configuration required to sign up for a service and to dial in the AOL server farm. AOL essentially had the same network model as the LAN-based DEC architecture. AOL subscribers would log on to their servers and see other subscribers who were online, exchange IM/emails, and browse AOL-hosted company sites. AOL was a huge LAN network where you couldn’t access content outside of AOL.

At the height of AOL’s popularity, there were 30+ million subscribers. It became so popular that every brick-and-mortar store was buying AOL keywords to reach AOL subscribers (the similarity is striking with what we see today with Facebook pages, as Peter Yared points out on his Venturebeat.com article).

But AOL did not leverage the explosive growth of content outside AOL’s walled garden. As people found richer content outside the AOL network and companies realized they had to make separate investments to reach non-AOL users, users and content creators started to migrate.

Only after losing more than two-thirds of its peak subscribers did AOL start to retool itself into an Internet portal site, i.e., a gateway to an open Internet. In effect, AOL finally dismantled the walls around its isolated garden and federated with the rest of the Internet, albeit only after paying a heavy price.

3. Disjointed IM Networks to Federation

After ICQ became successful and acquired by AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google launched their own instant messaging networks. Again, people were chatting in a similar approach as the DEC server/workstation model. AOL users were able to IM with AOL users, MSN users with other MSN users, and so forth.

Unlike islands of email services, technologies were available to federate these services in their early days. However, each provider stood their ground and couldn’t work out an agreement to federate. It was only after enterprises started to deploy their own enterprise IM servers and federate with each other that AOL and others began to federate with other IM networks.

IM network providers refused to give up control over their user base to the detriment of the long-term benefit of doing so. But, the fact is that people have been getting around these disjointed networks by creating aggregator IM clients to combine AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and Google Talk networks (not to mention Skype and Facebook – check out IM+ for the latest attempts at building the ultimate aggregator). It’s futile to resist improvised user workarounds. You have to adapt your service to support these workarounds as valid use cases.

4. What About a Federation of Social Networks?

If we have learned any lessons from email, AOL, and instant messaging, it’s that social networks should federate with each other to create a global exchange of real-time status updates. It’s not a zero-sum game. As social networks federate with each other, the value of the resulting network is far greater than the sum of disjointed networks.

We are starting to see this happen already. Twitter has shared its feeds with LinkedIn and Facebook. MySpace is now connected with Facebook. Yammer, which has developed a social networking platform for enterprises, is connected to Microsoft Sharepoint.

But then there are signs of resistance, as evidenced by Facebook’s and Google’s policies not to share friends’ lists.

Walled-garden policies invite users to create workarounds. Just as islands of IM networks motivated users to create IM aggregators like Trillian and Meebo, preventing users from sharing friends’ lists is already prompting users to create workarounds, such as Facebook friend exporter. Rather than resisting federation, social networks need to embrace them.

In reality, however, those who are in control seld
om relinquish it voluntarily. History tells us that federation will be a gradual process and will pick up steam only when the perceived value outside Facebook outweighs what’s found within Facebook. For that perception shift to occur, someone must create a more compelling use case outside Facebook.

What might cause this perception shift? I have no idea. But I can tell you that it won’t be called social networking, but rather, something else. I couldn’t agree more with Pete Cashmore at RWW: it’ll be someone who introduces a different communication paradigm than what we know as a “status update” today.

When that next wave happens, users will start to see greater value outside Facebook and will force Facebook to fully federate with other social networks. Until then, I expect to see continued resistance from leading networks. And yes, Google will join the race soon, and things are going to get a lot more interesting before federation is a household term.

Vantage: It’s officially the best.

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2010 marks my tenth year with FaceTime – and
I’ve seen some changes in those 10 years – no more so than in the Financial
Services sector, where Vantage, the product that I manage excels.  Having a third party organization verify that
is exceedingly gratifying – and that’s what happened recently.  At the SC Magazine Europe Awards in London,
Vantage was unveiled as the Best Security Solution for Financial Services.

 

Perhaps it’s the pedigree – Vantage is based
on the equally award winning IMAuditor, perhaps it’s the new features that we
rolled out recently (from support for Microsoft OCS CAC, to Group Chat support
and Skype).  Maybe it’s the product
manager….

 

Ultimately, I think its that we absolutely
understand the requirements of financial institutions, their reliance on real
time communications, rigorous regulatory requirements and we do this alongside
our understanding of the real time collaborative internet. 

 

Features such as real-time logging and policy for Microsoft Group Chat,
data leak prevention for file transfers, zero day worm protection, inline legal
disclaimers and a full 360 degree audit capability make Vantage uniquely
positioned in heavily regulated industries such as Financial Services.

 

Who am I kidding, of course it’s all due to the product management….

 

Brian Babin is Director of Product Management for FaceTime’s Vantage and
Insight products and celebrates his tenth year with the company in 2010

It’s 10 pm, do you know where your ESI is?

… or even what it is?

 

Back in the old days, TV networks would run public service spots before the nightly news saying: “It’s 10 pm, do you know where your children are?” The fact that the spots ran for twenty years in cities like New York points out that it is easy to lose track of stuff, even important stuff.  Which brings me to ESI–Electronically Stored Information.  Not that it is as important as your kids, but in the discovery phase of a big lawsuit, it might seem that way.  And, like kids, ESI can be surprisingly easy to lose track of.

 

ESI is the catch-all term for the digitally stored files of litigants in a federal case.  During the pre-trial discovery phase of a lawsuit, all ESI is subject to discovery, meaning it all has to be checked for relevant information that the other side has requested to help it prove its case.  Only the relevant files need to be actually given to the opposing party, but all ESI has to be checked to make sure all the relevant files have been located and handed over.  It sounds simple enough, but it is hard if you are not prepared in advance and a lot can go wrong. 

 

When the e-discovery rules changed in late 2006, there was a lot of commotion about it, and a lot was written about the need for companies to have their ESI organized and well maintained in order to be able to respond to the tight discovery timelines set by the new rules. I don’t think that message has really sunk in though.  And now that the rules are no longer “new,” and the commotion has died down, it is easy for companies to lose track of whether they have really prepared to meet the current e-discovery challenges.  Yes, the e-discovery market is growing nicely, but more spending is not assurance that the companies really understand all the risks or even the problems they are trying to solve. 

 

As the resident lawyer at FaceTime, I am occasionally asked to talk about e-discovery issues with customers, or on a panel. Sometimes I can tell that a person I’m speaking with just doesn’t want to have to deal with instant messaging in e-discovery, even when IM is used for business purposes in their company. To them, the most obvious way not to deal with it is to make it go away, or more precisely, to take the position that IM logs are not business records and therefore will not be saved. 

 

No saved IM records, no IM ESI, problem solved. 

 

There are undoubtedly circumstances where this is a sound policy, but what I’ve seen is that such a position is most often taken without enough attention to the reality of how easily IM logs are stored in hard-to-find places, and how difficult it is to effectively enforce a “no IM records” policy when employees use IM for business purposes and may need to refer to those logs the way they refer back to e-mail.  The company falls into the trap of mistaking its ESI policy, what the company wants its ESI to be, with the reality of what its ESI actually is — i.e., what is actually saved, either inadvertently or surreptitiously against policy. 

 

The resulting danger is that the ESI is there, but the company doesn’t know it exists until too late. My recommendation is usually that if IM is used for business, then it will generate business records that should be maintained and be treated on par with e-mail records for e-discovery purposes.

 

If the IM-savvy, and sometimes IM-dependent, companies that FaceTime deals with are still coming to terms with IM logs in regard to e-discovery, then I have to believe that companies in general have not moved much beyond e-mail archiving, if they have a proactive e-discovery solution at all.  To me, that’s like being happy that one of your kids is watching TV with you at 10 pm. and forgetting about the one you haven’t seen since yesterday.

The Gold medal for IM faux pas goes to…

I’m admittedly not an “early adopter,” and I’m typically not the latest to jump on a new technology trend (and yes I still have problems organising my DVD recorder), but heading up FaceTime’s EMEA marketing group has meant I’ve needed to get with the program. Along the way, I’ve made my share of social networking faux pas, so I came with a plan to see how many more luddites there were trying to make their way in the social networking world… and how many had made the same mistakes as me.

 

So, with this in mind, we launched a (completely anonymous) survey and I sent out invitations via good ole email, and even via my Facebook and LinkedIn buddies … oh boy.  I have to say it was interesting reading (and I almost wish it hadn’t been anonymous now!).

 

We immediately received stories from users who showed an almost Olympian prowess at doing the wrong thing. Computer Weekly reported on some of the results of the survey.

 

Here’s a recap: More than a third of the 77% of respondents that can access IM services at work admitted to sending an instant message to the wrong person, occasionally to the very person they were talking about and frequently to their superiors. Sending kisses, checking on the whereabouts of loved ones and derogatory comments about co-workers and superiors have all ended up in a manager’s chat window. One respondent even confessed to sending a joke of an explicit sexual nature accidentally to the Financial Director.

 

A lack of forward thinking (I put myself at the head of the list!) when posting new and updates generally was evident in faux-pas anecdotes given during the course of the survey.

 

One respondent posted to Twitter “Woohoo! I’ve finished for the day” at 4pm rather than his finish time of 5:30 pm, only to receive a call from a colleague asking how he was enjoying the sunshine. Another stated that he was an eager job seeker to his current, and rather surprised, employer.

 

Just 5% of respondents had sent confidential information to the wrong person. However, one such error resulted in the company’s telephony and internet access being used by someone else at the organisation’s expense.

 

Nearly 16% of respondents said that they had clicked on an attachment or a link within an IM that had turned out to be malware. 42% of those said their anti-virus protection did not catch it.

 

Nearly three quarters of people surveyed could access social networking sites at work, but only two thirds said that their employer’s policy allowed them, showing that adequate policy enforcement tools were not in place. The most popular sites by far that people used were LinkedIn and Facebook, with 33.1% of respondents saying they had the most friends on LinkedIn, compared with 32% that said real life friends topped their list. 

 

The bottom line is, people are engaging in communications via IM and social networking at work. Enabling IM and Web 2.0 communications can bring great benefits to companies, but IT departments need to consider the risks involved and make sure that security, policy control and compliance are introduced as standard best practice.

 

Perhaps the best advice for users is summed up by one of the survey respondents who said “I always check twice, to see if I’ve been naughty or nice.”