Efficient and Cost-effective Email Management With XML

you can save tremendous amounts of money and lessen your risk.

Below is a checklist for the types of performance capabilities that must be available with any compliance/liability-avoidance solution you integrate to manage your email. As you'll see in the next section of this article, many solutions on the market cannot offer all of these capabilities because the systems are based on proprietary, database-focused storage systems. Only open, non-proprietary XML-based systems, such as those offered by ZyLAB, can truly address all of the needs required by users needing flexible solutions to drive their email management needs.

The capabilities required for good email management that are fully supported by an XML framework include:

• Capturing: Make sure flexibility is built into your email capturing solutions, especially in terms of allowing individual users to archive emails directly from MS-Outlook in the proper sections of a filing plan. Also, the full capture of all email must be allowed from your email servers for auditing and enforcement purposes.
• Storing: Email needs to be stored in an open (non-database) format that is endurable and sustainable. You do not want to continually convert email collections over time.
• Analyzing and enhancing content: Make sure that automatic coding, text-mining, OCR (of bitmap attachments) and automatic translation tools are available to help you get 100% recall.
• Searching: Demand an advanced full-text search engine that can search terabytes of data.
• De-duplication: Find exact and near duplicates, which will often reduce the size of your data collection by 50% and save you time in the remaining phases.
• Review: Make sure that you can review documents quickly on their merit for the case and determine where redactions need to be applied.
• Redaction: Ensure that you can redact confidential, sensitive and private information.
• Disclosure: Rely on XML-based Web technology to securely disclose documents to other parties or burn relevant data to CD or DVD, which can lead to significant cost savings (such as on paper in extensive disclosures).

Thinking Outside the "Database Box"

As opposed to XML-based systems, proprietary storage systems embed a variety of risks. Consider, for example, the thousands of businesses in the 1990s that bought the popular optical storage systems. Not only were most of these systems proprietary, but the majority of the vendors in that segment have gone out of business or put their development and support resources elsewhere.

In general, the database-driven approach seems logical given many vendors' traditional or core expertise with database-oriented solutions. But being so attached to a traditional database-driven viewpoint automatically triggers hidden future costs when long-term email management is a requirement. For example, Microsoft SQL server has had four different versions over the last eight years, which means in most cases users must perform a conversion with each new release, as some of the older versions are not supported with newer versions of Microsoft's database.

The need to move forward and support all the considerations required by long-term, appropriate email management—security, sustainability, affordability (in terms of both upfront costs and minimal long-term expenditures for conversions or upgrades), compatibility (between systems, tools and storage media), and suitability for e-discovery activities—would seem to indicate building solutions less reliant on storage-focused database systems and more on systems built on, or at least in close association with, a flexible, enduring and affordable XML-based infrastructure.

In fact, some traditionally database-reliant vendors are acknowledging the need to move beyond reliance on databases, integrating some XML storage capabilities into their solutions. But making a token nod to XML while still relying on databases to perform "heavy" storage doesn't really solve many of the core issues discussed here. Even a partial reliance on databases will still increase costs (as well as require upgrades every few years), create more opportunities for "liability vaults," enhance the potential that old information may eventually lose its integrity, pose potential integration issues and make detailed management of data, especially in proactive investigative situations, more difficult and risk-intensive.

XML-based, Compliance-modeled Email Management

Many agencies in the US government are using the types of processes advocated here, and are supporting them with XML, to great effect. These agencies are saving money and getting better performance and efficiency because their processes are thorough and their XML platform ensures them of the following:

• Sustainable, secure and enduring infrastructure, regardless of how much information is stored;
• Cost containment, due to no required conversions or high upfront costs; and
• An array of supporting tools that greatly enhance capabilities for e-discovery and e-disclosure.

Organizations can only hope to become more efficient and better positioned to avoid risks if they are able to honestly evaluate and develop the processes that they can actually implement and adhere to. As mentioned above, only a true, 100% XML solution can ensure all of the capabilities needed to support the email and document management processes now having to be implemented by so many organizations: cheap storage, enduring and sustainable, flexible and modular. At the same time, these solutions address functionality required in a legal discovery and disclosure process: searching, analyzing data, organizing, de-duplication, document review, redaction and advanced disclosure by Web technology, but also by CD and DVD.

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ZyLAB is an innovative developer of affordable content management and compliance solutions for paper- intensive organizations. ZyIMAGE, ZyLAB's flagship solution, helps small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and government organizations digitally file and manage millions of pages of paper, electronic documents and email. High-quality search and retrieval features (which support over 200 languages) give users the ability to easily organize, investigate and distribute information.

With more than 7,000 installations worldwide and more than 300,000 users, ZyLAB has a wide breadth of experience and knowledge across a variety of different industries and business applications. For more information visit: www.zylab.com

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