Published on Sep 26, 2022 When talking with our customers about discovery, specifically Microsoft Office 365 (M365), it becomes apparent that the rush to M365 during the pandemic introduced new speed bumps and roadblocks into their processes.
Most organizations are unaware of the constraints of the M365 ecosystem and the major issues that can arise when doing discovery activities. Many issues exist in the content itself, but the M365 ecosystem has definitely deepened the breadth of the issues. What we are seeing more and more frequently is that the results are missing items due to unindexed or partial indexed content. These missed items are required for processing and thus mandate manual interactions and quality control.
While M365 can be seen as a sophisticated solution integrated with a company’s information, the truth is that in most cases, content is being exported and pushed down to other tools to do the heavy lifting of indexing and searching to get the best results.
Teams’ attachments and content storage mechanisms are one the largest issues customers experience with Teams. Most organizations have little to no guidance on the best practices to use the tools at their disposal, and so they aren’t storing data in the most advantageous places. Proper M365 education is not just about how to use the tools, but knowing what exists, where, when, and for how long.
The same can be said for compliance and governance – the tools exist but the implementation is lacking. Organizations need to learn the compliance and governance capabilities at their fingertips in order to do cleanup and retention, such as deleting data, creating records plans, governing data and usage, and making litigation overall easier!
Microsoft allows organizations to buy licenses customized to the activities they want to accomplish. You can choose your workflows and process.
Discovery is now a service built into the ecosystem. Organizations need workflows and processes to do the work within the ecosystem. It’s no longer seen as a tool used to perform a task, but as a process and workflow to get to a result.
How do you prepare?
Organizations need to look at operation governance, rules, and policies for engaging in the ecosystem – a playbook for interacting with M365, creation, deletion, consumption, etc.
Take the time to get educated, to understand the ecosystem, and not just the tools. Then go back and look at how you are handling your data:
ID currently offers a litigation readiness assessment where experts will work with your discovery and litigation teams to educate, evaluate, and recommend processes and workflows so that you can be
confident in your eDiscovery collections.
