Marie: The Notes environment certainly has data management and retrieval capabilities, but these don't provide a solution for organizations looking to reduce costs associated with growing volumes of Notes email. That's where functionality such as Single Instance Storage comes into its own. We have comprehensive mailbox management capabilities, such as "soft" quotas to automatically manage mailbox sizes and support for offline/laptop users.

We have extensive retention and records management capabilities, which is really important for organizations that need to retain email for compliance reasons, for instance. Plus, we enable organizations to capture all email -- inbound, outbound and internal (and then set retention on it). So regardless of what users decide to do once they receive an email, alter it, delete it, etc., the organization can be confident that it has an irrefutable copy of email records. Generally speaking, you don't want your end users being one man/woman records managers and deciding what's important and therefore needs to be retained.

As we archive email, we full text index it (as well as any attachments), to ensure that you can find it in the future. And with the information archived, we offer a lot of "value add" functionality, such as the ability to set retention periods and suspend normal retention in the event of litigation case holds.

We have the concept of "active case management" that's really valuable during e-discovery processes. We've developed patent pending search capabilities that provide Google-like search speeds as well as a search interface (the Search Wizard) to make the search process very simple for non-IT users (who are increasingly involved in the e-discovery process).

Another key function is process chain of custody. We retain an auditable log of every email we archive, which is essential if you want to prove that the email we've archived is an irrefutable copy. And finally, our Lotus Notes capabilities are part of a single archiving and records management platform for any electronic record. This is crucial as organizations start to develop and enforce policies around all electronic records, rather than silo'd archiving solutions.

David: Even though storage is cheap, I'd imagine finding a single email message in a 50 terabyte storage array might be quite a challenge. What's your technology and how does it help in this situation?

Marie: That's exactly the thought on most network managers' minds right now -- even if the content is all there, how long will it take to search through it? We're aware that this is starting to become a big issue for a number of vendors in this market -- they can get the stuff into the archive, but finding it quickly and accurately is a whole different issue.

We've been in the archiving market for 13 years, so we're used to working with customers that have massive volumes of records archived. Last year we took search capabilities to another level when we announced patent-pending technology, called Rapid-AXS, as an integrated part of our solution. It uses grid architecture and commodity hardware to radically improve foreground search speeds. For instance, it takes searches that maybe took 20 minutes down to seconds.