Larry Briggi of FTI Technology describes Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 as “the next dumping ground”. SharePoint is already here and now and having stuff dumped in it daily. FTI’s SharePoint Harvester is one of the new products aimed at meeting the problems which SharePoint raises. Technical comparisons fall outside my remit, but Larry’s blunt description of the problem caught my eye, so I asked him to explain what the problems are in terms which a lawyer would understand.

Parallel  announcements from different vendors induce a kind of writerly paralysis in me. The press releases roll in, many accompanied by invitations to speak to someone authoritative about them. The fact that several companies have addressed the same problem indicates that the subject is an important one, but the vocabulary for describing it is finite, and five articles in succession covering the individual ways in which the problem has been tackled is not an audience-winner. I am not much interested in just passing on press releases, nor am I technically qualified to compare the merits of each (which would, in any event, require exhaustive hands-on testing in a live environment), so rival claims about relative capabilities leave me cold. Any list is bound to omit someone with a claim to a mention, so there is a temptation to avoid the subject altogether for fear of offending someone. Last but not least, May and June are always crazy times when product releases and industry announcements flood out over a period when I am either at a conference, packing to go to a conference, or sitting in an airport lounge in a cold, grey dawn when my body thinks it is tea time.

Really, though, I am interested in market trends rather than products – the problems which are being faced by companies and lawyers and what sort of solutions the providers are coming up with to help them deal with them, with a particular focus on the UK. My role is not so much reportage (that is Charles Christian’s job) or analysis (I leave that to the The 451 Group), but helping lawyers to understand what implications arise when they have to collect their clients’ documents and data for disclosure. Given that most UK lawyers are still struggling with the idea that Word and Excel files are “documents” at all, and since I write for the long-term not for tomorrow’s deadline, I am let off the production of “news” and do not feel too embarrassed if time elapses between an announcement and my coverage of it.  My piece of a few days ago about a $25 million ediscovery sale is a rare example of a story which (thanks to Twitter) I had  before almost everyone else and which warranted some instant journalism.

So, if I pick on FTI Technology’s SharePoint solution, SharePoint Harvester, as the hook for a post about SharePoint, it is not because the news has just broken (it came out in early May), nor because it is better than anyone else’s solution (it may be, but I am not qualified to say), nor because FTI is at the front of some notional queue (I love you all), nor because FTI troubled to spend an hour telling me about it (I am sure that the others would have done the same). It is what came out when I put my hand into the bran-tub marked SharePoint.

Begin, perhaps, with Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 web site and its own article Planning for eDiscovery How SharePoint Server 2010 supports eDiscovery. Focus on the passage which reads Auditing, expiration policies, and search are considerations that you should evaluate. Your planning decisions in these areas should be completed in advance of the possibility of any need arising for using eDiscovery.

Microsoft is very good at coming up with the means of creating and storing documents. In discovery terms, however, it looks like the inventor of a flying machine whose entire focus has been on getting the thing in the air. When it says Your planning decisions …. should be completed in advance of the possibility of any need arising for using eDiscovery, it is like the inventor shouting after the already airborne pilot that he must remember to work out how he is going to land. As Tom Lehrer said of the inventor of the V2 rockets

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down”
That’s not my department”, said Werner Von Braun

FTI’s SharePoint Harvester is one of the products (Autonomy, Recommind, Nuix, Kazeon have others) which provide solutions which help to land all this stuff which Microsoft enables everyone to create – note the adroit switch there from “land” as in bringing airborne things to the ground to “land” as in bringing ashore the fish which you want to catch and, by analogy, the documents which you need to meet a discovery obligation.

I spoke to Larry Briggi of FTI Technology whose description of  SharePoint 2010 as “the next dumping ground” for corporate information caught my eye. Users can create children or sister sites easily and, however much control IT departments can exercise elsewhere, they have a real problem when the lawyers ask for all documents meeting specific criteria. Not the least of the problems is that the content is dynamic, so that a search at a given time may be out of date almost immediately. Each level can have its own security; indexing may be turned on or off, and a keywords list will almost certainly be inadequate to find what is needed.

FTI’s SharePoint Harvester works by custodian rather than by keywords and searches by the date on which documents have been added, modified or accessed by any custodian. This requires integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory. This sounds simple, but the issues which come up include users with alternative names (different permutations of first name, last name, initials and other legitimate but confusing variants), users who have left the company, those who have changed their name and, not least, those whose identity is hidden behind a group name. In addition, the person who added a document is not necessarily the one who wrote it – indeed, shared authorship is one of the obvious benefits of using SharePoint at all.

SharePoint Harvester is offered as “an integrated technology and service offering” that is, a software application and consultancy services go hand in hand. One can see the sense in this at this stage in SharePoint development – the early stages of wide adoption of a platform expressly designed to create customisable environments inevitably lead to an unpredictable landscape; the result is not just a Wild West, but a series of Wild Wests, each with its own characteristics. It is helpful to have a guide.

Their value appears at the primary level of identifying custodians. The first step is to create a database of all available groups and to normalise them, that is, to arrive at a single identifier for each person. FTI produces a spreadsheet showing automatic matches, manual matches (that is, where it is fairly obvious that two names represent the same person), unknowns for the HR department to identify and completely unknowns, that is, people who have no Active Directory account.

This has obvious value anyway when one comes to search through the collected data, but Larry Briggi drew attention to the value of such a list when, at a later stage, opponents seek to ambush you by adding custodians. You have the names list and you have the data collected at the outset; it is, relatively speaking, a trivial matter to widen the scope of the search to the additional custodians.

Another aspect which FTI emphasises is the pricing structure. They have a formula based on data volumes and the number of custodians which allows for predictable pricing; the quotation includes the collection and normalisation of names, the analysis and the first Harvest. Harvester can be run either behind a firewall or run remotely.

There is, obviously, much more than this in any product which grapples with such a sophisticated data source. As I said in opening, my role in life is not to provide technical comparisons or analysis, but to help lawyers understand what the problems are and to know that solutions exist. Before you get to worry about how to deal with SharePoint data you need to appreciate that it exists at all  One of the potential issues with SharePoint is that its integration into corporate life gets taken for granted and it can become invisible to those who use it. The lawyer needs to ask if SharePoint is used and, if so, to make sure the software supplier can deal with it.

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