Businesses around the world must be able to keep and protect important information and quickly find what's relevant to continue to meet legal, business, and regulatory compliance requirements. Spending days, if not weeks, manually sifting through millions of files to find the small number that are relevant isn't just expensive, it isn't an option.
At Microsoft, we know how demanding and complex compliance can be. As you might imagine, being a large enterprise operating at a global scale, we're subject to many discovery requests every year.
Our legal department uses the eDiscovery features of Office 365 to improve the accuracy and usefulness of our discovery results and save millions of dollars per year.
We recently released three new eDiscovery features in Office 365: Unified Case Management, Optical Character Recognition and Rights Management System. These new eDiscovery features further strengthen the rich set of eDiscovery capabilities already present in Office 365 to help you quickly investigate and meet internal, legal and regulatory obligations from the Security & Compliance Center.
Here are more details about the new eDiscovery features we released:
Unified Case Management
To streamline eDiscovery case definition and eliminate several steps in the process, thereby reducing potential human errors, we have developed a consistent user interface which spans the eDiscovery capabilities in Office 365 from core to advanced. This eliminates the need to create separate cases in Advanced eDiscovery. Now case information from eDiscovery flows seamlessly into Advanced eDiscovery for further analysis.
Optical Character Recognition
Most content in Office 365 is indexed and searchable, but there will always be some content that doesn't have associated text. In many eDiscovery cases, most unindexed content is in image files.
With its new optical character recognition (OCR) capability, Advanced eDiscovery will extract text from image files or objects within the files. OCR is supported for loose image files, email attachments and embedded images. The OCR feature in Advanced eDiscovery gives the machine-learning process an even deeper understanding of the documents by including the text extracted from image files, too. This significantly reduces the amount of manual remediation work required to analyze image files.
RMS Decryption
In Office 365 eDiscovery, it has always been possible to search RMS encrypted content inside of your organization. The new RMS decryption feature in Office 365 eDiscovery now makes it easy to export and view RMS encrypted content. The process is easy as RMS encrypted email messages are automatically decrypted at export time when you choose the MSG Export option.
Future enhancements
Office 365 has a rich set of in-place eDiscovery capabilities that help organizations investigate and meet information requests directly from the Security & Compliance Center.
To take advantage of Unified Case Management, Optical Character Recognition and RMS Decryption, simply go to Search and & Investigation in the Security & Compliance Center of your tenant.
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