Three important new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure will take effect on December 1, 2006, in the United States, unless Congress disapproves:

• Rules 26 and 34 define electronically stored information and specify the form in which electronically stored information is produced.
• Rule 37 specifies when information may be disposed of and when it must be preserved because of pending litigation.

Under these new rules, parties may argue what electronically stored information is relevant and how it is produced, but no longer can electronically stored information be excluded from litigation. Also, there’s no excuse for destroying electronic information when litigation is pending. Electronically stored information shall be treated the same as paper documents.

In the short term, companies will continue to respond to electronic discovery requests on a case-by-case basis. Longer term, a more economical approach to electronic discovery of all electronically stored information is needed. Look for new products from existing and new vendors to fill this demand.

You can read the complete description of the new rules (PDF).

… Bob Spurzem

You might think it’s services like Vonage that are driving VoIP use among consumers.

Instant messaging is much more important. Many instant messaging services have added VoIP connectivity, and the marriage of IM and presence with VoIP is very natural. In fact, the best-known VoIP service, Skype, is as much an IM network as a VoIP service.

The number of regular users illustrates this:

• Vonage has about 2 million regular users.
• Skype says it has over 110 million "customers." It probably has about 30 million regular users, of which about 7 million are online at any time.
• AOL, MSN, and Yahoo perhaps have another 50 million regular VoIP users.

… David Ferris

Journaling exists in current versions of Microsoft Exchange. In Exchange 2007, journaling is much more flexible.

Journaling — not to be confused with database logging — currently involves keeping a copy of all email sent and received by a mailbox store. In Exchange 2007, journaling can be configured per mailbox store (database), per distribution list, or per user. All messages can be journaled or just those sent internally or externally. Messages can be journaled based on message sender, recipient, or content.

Exchange journaling is used by third-party email archiving solutions to capture email for compliance. Be careful when enabling journaling. It increases server load up to 35% and may require dedicated server resources. Refer to this TechNet article for more information.

… Bob Spurzem

In September, VoxLib plans to launch Vox for Skype. This runs on your PC and extends Skype to your mobile phone. From your mobile, you can call your PC and:

• See who’s online
• Make Skype calls
• Get your Skype voicemail
• Make international PSTN calls via SkypeOut

The main benefit will probably be the ability to make cheap international calls from your mobile, usually over "free" plan minutes.

Skype’s got a growing third-party ecosystem; VoxLib illustrates. For more, see the Skype Extras Gallery. That in turn helps to make Skype even more attractive.

… David Ferris

Managed Folders Adds Retention Capability to Exchange 2007

Reconnex is a young firm focused on detecting and managing the risks of insider threats. Founded in 2003, it has some 70 staff. The firm says customers include WebEx, George Washington University, and Maimonides Medical Center.

Reconnex’s product, iGuard, is a content monitoring appliance. It has two very interesting capabilities:

• Monitoring and scanning in real time of sent content across all protocols and ports. This capability is particularly useful in that errant SMTP email content usually scanned only on port 25 would be detected when redirected to any other port.
• Capturing of policy-defined content in a database. The database can then be used as an investigation tool. For example, when an employee leaves the company the database can be queried to determine exactly what the employee sent to whom in the weeks prior to departure. The database can also be used to find out where information is sent; for example, if malware is gathering and sending out a company’s login and password information to a foreign country in which the company does not do business.

… Nancy Cox

Email Archiving Embraces Instant Messaging

Researchers at AOL released about 20 million search queries from about 650,000 people collected over a three-month period from March 1, 2006 to May 31, 2006. This is noteworthy as the amount of data is substantial and the data are current and unfiltered. The notes accompanying the data stated: "The goal of this collection is to provide real query log data that is based on real users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation, or other types of search research."

Without a doubt the data will be useful for researchers. Microsoft Research released similar data to researchers earlier this year, under much more controlled circumstances that included privacy and licensing constraints.

However, the problem is that the data also include a significant amount of personal information contained in the searches. When informed, AOL executives quickly decided this was a mistake and to their credit publicly acknowledged it. TechCrunch has the full response from AOL.

A New York Times reporter tracked down one AOL user by studying her search terms (the article is now offline, but there’s a summary of blogger reaction to the story at Computerworld). Some of the private data include email addressees, Web logins and passwords that are embedded in URLs, as well as phone numbers and physical addresses. The data also include a great many tech support queries that could be useful for vendors to see what a general user base is searching to solve.

The data are in a 440MB archive, which expands into 10 data files that total over 2.1GB. The five fields in the data set include the user’s anonymous ID, the query, the time the query was issued, and the rank and domain of the result clicked on (if any). The original AOL research site has been removed, however the data is mirrored in a number of locations. Ironically, several enterprising individuals have put up Web-based interfaces to search the queries, complete with Google Adwords.

This week, AOL announced three people are leaving the company in connection with this privacy breach. Again, Computerworld has a summary.

… Ben Gross and Richi Jennings

Log File Replication Simplifies Exchange Disaster Recovery

Access to Archived Data Assists Mobile Workforce