Suppliers Suggest White House Email Fixes

The email management problems at the White House are common to many organizations, and solutions are not only readily available, they're cheap and easy to implement. Just ask any email archiving supplier.

"There is no technological reason why their email went unarchived," says Paul DArcy, VP of marketing at MessageOne, the email archiving service provider now owned by Dell after a $155 million acquisition deal closed last week. "We could solve their problems for under $1,000 a month. That includes hardware, software, services, and storage."

Not that the White House is asking. For the last eight years, that agency has been repeatedly confronted with questions about its email preservation techniques -- or lack thereof. The agency and its current CIO Theresa Payton remain embroiled in legal disputes with the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive at George Washington University over the inability to account for specific email documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The situation may be coming to a head. In a court order issued last week, U.S. magistrate judge John M. Facciola gave the Executive Office of the President (EOP) until Monday, May 5, to determine "whether all back-up tapes created between March 2003 and October 2003 have been preserved – and, to the extent that they have not, to state the specific dates within that period for which no back-up tapes exist."

It's questionable whether the White House will produce the desired evidence. A series of testimonies, including a statement to a House of Representatives committee by Payton in February portray a group of IT pros who haven't yet established an effective archiving strategy for email, and may not do so before the present administration moves on.Shortly after Bush assumed office, for instance, the EOP group realized that shifting from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange would break the archiving method used with the Automatic Records Management System (ARMS) in use up to then. But instead of replacing the old system, the EOP IT staff began intermittently pulling the Exchange journal and placing it on various EOP servers. According to a Congressional memorandum issued in February 2008, this ad hoc process continued from September 2002 through October 2006.

Even after a custom-built archiving system for Exchange was ordered and completed, Payton decided not to adopt it in August 2006, citing data migration and security concerns.

In February 2008, however, Payton told members of Congress that the EOP was on track to implement a Documentum system from EMC to archive email: "The EOP is currently in the process of deploying Documentum and its platform extensions for records management, a DOD-approved system that meets NARA [U.S. National Archives and Records Administration] guidelines and will meet the EOP's requirements for records management and archiving," Payton told the House committee.

But so far, it's not clear how or when the new system will go live. EMC won't comment on any arrangements with the EOP. And any new system will not be able to produce email that is missing or wasn't archived in the first place.

To Page 2The White House case illustrates the challenges facing many organizations: First, to archive email in an efficient manner; second, to organize it and make it searchable; and third, to restrict its use or movement when litigation is pending.

Not surprisingly, suppliers of email archiving systems say these issues are common to nearly every organization.

"From a technology perspective... the issues for government are the same as those facing big companies," says Dell MessageOne's D'Arcy.

Another supplier, C2C, says the White House doesn't face any more or less regulatory requirements than those of a large financial services firm. And a solution would be easy and relatively inexpensive, according to C2C CEO Dave Hunt. "People don't realize how little it can cost them to keep their name out of the papers," he quips. He says a 200-mailbox implementation of his company's ArchiveOne product costs under $10,000. "Not exactly a fortune, is it?" he says.

Solutions aren't hard to find, either. Prospective buyers have an array of options when it comes to archiving email. There are products in the form of appliances and/or software from vendors like C2C. Oracle recently entered the market, signaling an interest by a large corporate software supplier. And services abound from Dell MessageOne, Autonomy Zantaz, and others.All of these suppliers are bursting to tell prospects how to avoid email archiving errors. In general, the claims coalesce into three basic suggestions:

Vendors aren't shy about saying they could also fix the White House's specific problems. Dave Hunt, for instance, claims C2C has a program that can automatically trace .pst files on networked servers and put them back into an email archive system, synchronizing any duplicates found.

In the end, the White House problem is a useful case study in what not to do about storing email. At the very least, it's helped focus the arguments for and against a range of common approaches to the growing problem of email management.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.