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<i>Product Review:</i> KVS's Enterprise Vault Slams the Door on e-Mail Retention Issues

By Erica Meyer Greathouse

Like most of you ' okay, all of you ' we struggled mightily with many concerns surrounding e-mail retention. The paramount question was: “Now that e-mail has become ubiquitous and constant, how do we ensure client-related mail becomes a part of the client record?” Ancillary, but no less vexing, questions like how to keep timekeepers from receiving constant “Your mailbox is over its limit” messages without giving them unlimited mailboxes (What limit short of unlimited would not result in that message? And the corruption and other risks of an unlimited mailbox are well-documented, given that Exchange is a truly terrible database), how to eliminate reliance on the notoriously fragile and unreliable PST, how to improve searching (Outlook, after all, does not permit searching attachments, and is painfully slow to search message content), how to eliminate redundant message storage, and how to effect some manner of collaboration, contributed to the stew of issues any solution would have to address in order to be effective.

In the spring of 2001, we happily rolled out new desktop hardware with Outlook 2000 integrated with Hummingbird's PowerDOCS 3.5.1, believing we had found the solution to our e-mail woes. A simple drag-and-drop into the proper DOCS library, familiar profiling (the e-mail integration automatically set the e-mail's subject line as the doc title, and mailbox name as author, saving LOTS of typing), combined with the ability to secure sensitive mail, would provide the answer to managing the unmanageable. We quickly found, however, the Achilles heel we had not considered. We had already discovered in our test environment that timekeepers would need to be taught to set profile defaults (eg, set client and matter number), so that multiple e-mails could be profiled quickly; however, we had not considered the fact that even with profile defaults set, the timekeeper had to click “OK” for EACH e-mail profiled. For a busy timekeeper trying to save potentially hundreds of e-mails per day, this simply wasn't workable and was soon abandoned by virtually everyone.

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