Thin email Client

One of the main problems in litigation readiness is to save mails and other is the duplication of mails in systems that affect the process. Employees store their emails locally and in the server also.

The problem is that emails are stored in two places and server spaces decrease day by day. Gmail has the ownership of all the emails in their server; likewise a company can also own the emails.

There is another problems in service based industry, while I was working with TCS I had two mail accounts, one is from TCS and other from my clients. I have to respond my clients through the client's account and TCS specified mail through TCS account. Here in this case though TCS is a stakeholder in the joint project, it does not have ownership or access to the emails that we sent to the clients and when I approached their Infrastructure maintenance people to add clients email to redirect to our server, they said that "according to policy of TCS it is not possible". Here the company's own email policy is a great hindrance to the litigation readiness.

One way is to create thin client based on the customer usage. Customer here refers to the employees who use the email system.

Based on the usage of the customer the thin clients can be designed. Employees more often send documents, spreadsheets and images as attachment. Gmail has made possible to attach an image on the body of the mail itself, if an efficient thin mail client can be designed such a way that drag and drop of the attachment is possible and some other rich text editing is possible then we can design a thin client email system.

I consider Gmail as thin client system, because I receive my mails for other IDs in Gmail along with my emails sent to my Gmail account. So I think Gmail as my email client and it can be opened from anywhere provided I should have internet connection.

My mails are all stored in one place. If this type of architecture can be followed in Companies then litigation readiness can be confined or concentrated to a single place and it will be easy for the organization to have control over all the mails.

 

E-Discovery and IT policies

E-Discovery

E-discovery is the process of mining the electronic data and produces the result as evidence during litigations. The FRCP act has been amended such that electronic data can be produced as evidence in litigations. This has considerably saved millions of paper and e-data can be retrieved easily by the tools available in the market.

But the question is about whether the tools are necessary or not to retrieve the document. The document retrieval process can become more tedious and the publishing or acquiring a document can take more time, so the answer to this problem is litigation readiness.

Being ready for litigation that is having the documents beforehand can save time and plays a crucial role in the case. But we have to predict which data saved is used for litigations. Saving all data makes us search in a single server instead of individual systems. The IT policies of the organization should be changed such a way that the data that are sensitive should be changed. A bottom-top approach should be formed so that identifying the sensitive data can be made easy.

IT in office

The IT infrastructure in offices has become outdated and there is a better IT structure available in homes than in offices. From my home I can chat with anyone and I can send voices and videos over the internet. The stringent policies in some organizations have blocked hi-fi and advanced technologies in the offices. Moreover the organizations encourage employees to work from their home and this increases productivity and decreases operation cost of organization. But the IT policies cannot be forced on the computers in employees house and IT policies that should be active over the employees is active only in a limited geographical area and the productivity can come from the computer that does not conform with the organization's IT policies. So there comes a situation where the IT policies are not being followed.

Email Retention policy

One of the greatest threats for any organizations which use emails for correspondence and communication is the storage space. Emails are easier, faster and they are electronic data. Emails are one of the main evidence in many litigations suites. They can be easily passed from one person to another and they have details like date and time when it reached and when the email was read. So the metadata for the emails can be easily formed and they can also be stored. In present scenario the emails are sent from anywhere and from any equipment be it cell phone, blackberry and they can be stored in many places. So they can be present in more than one place. Organizations have to save the emails for the litigation purpose and many organizations save it for 21-30 days only and this has created many problems. They cannot save all the emails because the storage space increases and it results in failure for any record management system in any organization. There is problem of storing more information in the server and the servers may become unstable due to this overburden of data. This could lead to loss of information. The hold everything approach will create the problem of data explosion. This problem has to be tackled by every IT/IS departments in each organizations.

Practical IT policy

Why should any organization have IT policies and was there any policies before computer came into place replacing the old information exchange tools such as letters and memos. After the advent of computer memos and mails are stored in many places and both the sender and receiver has the proof of sending and receiving the mail and they can access it anytime, before the emails the proof of receiving the mails are only their acknowledgment and they are not for every mail. But the sensitive mails are stored according to their acknowledgments. This is a example of bottom top approach to store the information of mails sent by paper. They don't store some mail to their friend for inviting them for lunch. So employee can easily identified the required documents for litigation and educating them on policies that hold for organizations data can be fruitful. So the tasks now to make policies on the data that are owned by the organizations.

I am working in an organization where the still correspondence is through snail mails. The employees also transfer their own letters, here one cannot force that non official emails should not be sent through the organization's mail account and this type of rules describes the IT-person as a dictator, So here the mails rather than system should be standardized. Official mails should have a header stating the type, priority and nature of the mail. That kind of mail should be stored by the email admin and they can be saved in separate servers.