Review: Info Management Tool Adds Investigative Capabilities For Exchange

Mimosa Systems this week released the latest version of its information management software, NearPoint 2.0, which introduces compliance monitoring for Microsoft Exchange to help companies with internal investigations.

NearPoint also offers storage compliance support for SEC rule 17a-4 by integrating with EMC's Centera storage devices, which guarantees that NearPoint databases are tamper-proof when using Centera products, according to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based Mimosa Systems.

In NearPoint 1.0, administrators were able to create auditor roles. Version 2.0 adds new compliance features such as eDiscovery, which allows investigator users to create sophisticated queries and searches. Essentially, eDiscovery helps companies that have to deal with litigation quickly narrow down e-mail messages that are crucial to an investigation.

eDiscovery queries can also be passed on to other reviewers, as well as be copied and updated. In addition, users can perform queries on queries to refine searches, which makes queries simple to use. eDiscovery provides sorting on any field so that as users start narrowing down messages in a review list, they can quickly find relevant dates or subject lines.

Users, too, can place retention holds on messages so that they can remain visible during investigations. The power of eDiscovery really becomes apparent when users begin to trace specific topics that were passed to multiple e-mail boxes. eDiscovery enables investigators to rapidly trace all the users that receive a message and follow through all the replies and forwards to find out everyone with knowledge of the subject under investigation.

What's more, eDiscovery can trace all the folders where messages existed, a function that can provide indirect clues to investigators when something occurred. For instance, when investigating an executive's mailbox on a specific date, by going back a couple of days before, administrators can see all the messages and folders that were deleted just before the date in question.

Internally, NearPoint 2.0 provides signature-based message recovery to prevent tampering and can alert administrators on messages that cannot be validated with original signatures. Customers that choose NearPoint's storage compliance option don't have the same concerns. Since Centera's write-once, read-many devices make messages unerasable, performing verifications and comparisons on messages at anytime will produce original signatures.

NearPoint's unique One Pass architecture makes use of Exchange's backup API to perform a dynamic log shipping mechanism, which constantly copies Exchange log data to NearPoint servers whenever message transactions occur. This mechanism is lightweight, so it doesn't depend on server agents. NearPoint goes further than just archiving Exchange logs and client PST files; it can also perform complete database, mailbox and message recovery without having to do complete restores.

With Exchange 2007 including a standardized metadata model on its unified messaging platform, Mimosa is developing ways to process additional metadata that's stored with the voice data from legacy PBX and VoIP systems.

NearPoint 2.0 starts at $9,995 for 100 mailboxes. Option pricing -- including eDiscovery option, the compliance storage option and the disaster recovery option -- is $4,000 each for 100 mailboxes.

For environments with more than 2,000 mailboxes, pricing is $40 per mailbox plus $16 per mailbox for the eDiscovery option, $8 per mailbox for the disaster recovery option and $8 per mailbox for the compliance storage option.