Product

How Does It Work?

Quickly delivering email intelligence requires being able to course through an email corpus, reacting to the data that you see and answering questions as soon as they arise. This method of discovery is not well served by traditional approaches using complex queries, "advanced search" pages, or multiple application "modes".

This observation led us to design an interface around the idea that you should always be exploring email – not reading some email, then going back to a query page to adjust your parameters, reading some more email, adjusting parameters, etc.

There is a single page to the application with no tabs to other functions or menus to other views. The application consists of a “deconstructed” email corpus, divided into its constituent parts (email text, dates, correspondents, and topics). As a result of this structure, there is an extremely meaningful interaction that takes place among the boxes screenshot of applicationdepending on the search performed, the order in which filters are applied and so forth. For instance, if one enters a keyword search, the order of persons corresponds merely to the number of times that correspondent turns up in the search results. However, if a topic is chosen, the order of people corresponds to who most intensely authored or received emails in that topic. As a result, the application informs the user with each action taken. Do you want to know who to depose with regard to a particular issue? Construct a comprehensive search related to that issue and look at the people box: the order in which they appear will correspond to those most intimately involved in the topic chosen, the keywords used, and the time filters applied. In other words, the system reflects the true social network of the enterprise in a way that is crucial to getting at important events. All the while, your email results update on the same screen, with every action that you take. It's a natural way not only to answer a variety of questions, but also to react to what you see and ask new questions as they are suggested.

Additional features of the product include:

  • Enter external events to provide context and focus discovery
  • Save and retrieve particular searches
  • Move back and forth through recent search history
  • View discussion threads
  • Inline tag and comment, and easily retrieve previously tagged emails
  • Graph email results in real time on an interactive timeline

Processing Steps

In order to be searched, email data must be:

  1. Extracted from its native format
  2. De-duped, Parsed, Thread-detected, Name-normalized, and Indexed
  3. Installed on the hosting appliance

How Are Emails Imported

On import, IT Discovery de-duplicates, parses, name-normalizes, and then indexes the texts of the emails. Should topic imputation be run initially, a separate process is performed and both the index and the imputed topics are placed into the application.

We accept email in standard MIME format, with attachments embedded. When necessary, we can accept and convert the following:

  • Concordance load file
  • Microsoft EDB/PST/MSG/DBX
  • Lotus NSF

Delivery

IT Discovery can be delivered as a hosted service or, in instances where sensitivity to where data resides and is served is very high, the index can be served locally via an appliance in your data center.

Hosted Solution

Our hosted solution lets us house all of the data and processing necessary to execute your e-discovery engagement at our data center and deliver it via a secure channel over the web. We perform all of the processing in our server farm, separately from other e-discovery engagements. Once it's ready, the application is delivered over the web via an encrypted channel that allows your team to access it from anywhere at any time.

Internal Appliance

For those engagements that don't allow for web-based delivery, we provide a self-contained appliance that comes pre-configured with our software. While the appliance is used to host data during discovery, initial processing is performed in our data center, with data transferred to the appliance via a secure port after processing, or delivered completely offline.