Storage Vendors Court Law Professionals For eDiscovery Technology

Symantec, Kazeon and Xiotech are among the IT vendors making the case for their products this week at LegalTech, a trade show focusing on technology for professionals involved with the law.

In the spotlight at the New York event is eDiscovery, the use of electronic tools to search for data for litigation purposes.

At the show, Symantec is unveiling Symantec Enterprise Vault 7.0, a new version of its content archival solution, as well as a new module for eDiscovery.

Art Gilliland, senior director of product marketing at Symantec, said Enterprise Vault 7.0 brings flexible automation in the archiving of data such as e-mail and instant messages based on the actual content of the data. The archiving can be done automatically based on predefined rules; manually via a pop-up that forces users to choose from preconfigured categories where the content will be archived; or via an interface to an enterprise content management application such as EMC Documentum or OpenText.

"Customers can set policies for classifying the data that helps decide what gets into an archive, and how long to vault it," Gilliland said. "Before, they could write policies based on such things as who the sender and receiver are. Now they can focus on the content. Archives need to be content-aware."

Enterprise Vault 7.0 also leverages new Microsoft applications for archiving data, Gilliland said. For instance, it can use Windows Rights Management Services to search encrypted e-mails for archiving, and it can natively look at instant messages to determine how to capture and archive them without going through Microsoft Exchange Server.

Deployment and management of Enterprise Vault also has been eased by the addition of an "uber-administrator" who centrally controls the creation of policies and can delegate part of that operation to subadministrators, according to Gilliland. "This is great for companies that add archiving as an internal service," he said.

Enterprise Vault 7.0, too, allows policies to be set for different people within an organization, such as the CEO and CIO, and even certain problem users, Gilliland said.

In addition, Symantec introduced a new module for Enterprise Vault 7.0: Discovery Accelerator, which adds archiving functionality specific to eDiscovery, including regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).

Gilliland said Discovery Accelerator includes technology for three components of the legal discovery process: the ability to easily collect archived information for predisclosure meetings, the ability to do a legal hold on archived data relevant to litigation (per Rule 37 of the FRCP(, and the ability to present archived content in its native format and enable both sides of a litigation to access it (per Rule 34 of the FRCP).

Enterprise Vault 7.0 and Discovery Accelerator are available now. Enterprise Vault starts at about $40 per user license per year for 25 users. Version 7.0 represents the first time that Symantec is selling the software on a per-user basis rather than requiring the purchase of bundles of licenses, Gilliland said.