Ms. NORTON. My goodness, I don't know how you did your job. You seem to have known nothing about it.

Archiving to PST files
As I mentioned above, I haven't fully evaluated all of the technical supporting information provided to the Committee. That said, one statement made by Ms. Payton jumped out at me:

Ms. PAYTON. Mr. Tierney, if I might, we still have PST files that we have not been able to associate with a component. I am assuming that was the same case back in 2005, but I do not know that for sure. They contain l7 million emails.

Yes, boys and girls, the White House archives its email to PST files. In his interrogatory, McDevitt states:

If my recollection is correct, at that time there were over 5,000 PST files with an average size of approximately 2 Gigabytes.

So, here's the thing. Let me put on my OutlookPower editor's hat for a moment. Probably the number one question we get from OutlookPower readers is how to recover corrupted PST files. PST is the file format Outlook uses to store its email in, and is quite explicitly not an enterprise-level archiving technology. There's also a limit to the PST file format, in that all PST files created by Outlook prior to Outlook 2003 had a 2 gigabyte limit. In fact, Microsoft recommends never, ever letting your PST file get above 1.6 gigs, because of the likelihood of corruption and the difficulty in restoration.

If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, well, that ain't good in a very big way.

For the record, the 2 gigabyte limit (and the 1.6 gig practical limit) isn't a secret. Most IT managers running Outlook are very aware of this, and we, here at OutlookPower have written about it numerous times. So to use PST files as a Presidential Records Act archiving methodology is an undeniable worst-practice.

Mischaracterization of Lotus Notes
There are "religions" in the tech world. There are those who swear by Macs and hate Microsoft and those who love Windows and find Apple incredibly annoying. Likewise, there are religions in IT. There are those who champion Microsoft Outlook and Exchange and those who champion Lotus Notes and Domino.

I support both sides. In fact, I make a good chunk of my living by covering both sides equally. In OutlookPower, we cover Outlook and Exchange and in DominoPower we cover Notes and Domino.

I'm telling you this so you understand that I'm not championing Notes in this discussion simply as a fanboy. Rather, I have years of professional experience with both platforms and consider both to be quality products with individual strengths.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because Congress is dangerously mischaracterizing Lotus Notes as obsolete technology, and that mischaracterization is skewing the understanding of why a transition between Notes and Outlook might have taken place at the White House. Here's some testimony to show you what I mean: