As hybrid remote work continues as the new normal, the need for virtual collaboration requires organizations to provide employees with innovative technology that enables real-time content creation and sharing. This can introduce challenges for security and compliance teams to ensure that data is discoverable.
With continued data proliferation, efficient data and document discovery tools are necessary to find relevant content and quickly respond to both internal investigations and external inquiries. With the current economic conditions putting pressure on organizations to reduce costs, it’s critical to identify areas for streamlining tools and processes for eDiscovery.
"The majority of costs associated with eDiscovery are still associated with the review process", and "the burn rate of review is a direct function of the volume of data and the speed of the reviewers. Reviewer speed can only be improved so much, but the volume of data is often way larger than it needs to be." as Ryan O'Leary states in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide eDiscovery Early Case Assessment Software 2022 Vendor Assessment (doc #US48970222, September 2022). "Proactive and thoughtful eDiscovery practitioners will optimize their early case activities to ensure that only the documents most likely to contain responsive materials are collected. Ensuring the data set is narrowly tailored, can save millions of dollars a year."
We are excited to announce that Microsoft is positioned in the Leaders category, as seen in Figure 1. One of the strengths that contributed to the Leadership position is the “Proximity to Microsoft 365 data” and that “Customers indicated that being able to investigate, search, and de-duplicate the data right within Microsoft 365 without moving it provided a huge advantage”. See more details and other strengths by reading the excerpt.
Figure 1: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide eDiscovery Early Case Assessment Software, 2022
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.
Today we are excited to announce several new capabilities within Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium) that will support modern collaboration, improve workflows and reduce costs to make the most of your investment with Microsoft.
Discover the version of a file at the time it was shared
Most customers would agree that documents attached to messages are part of the communication, and therefore there is a requirement to preserve and make that content discoverable. Before the use of cloud attachments, documents would be attached and embedded within a message, which means if the message was preserved, the attachment would be there. This created challenges for IT professionals as email inboxes grew to unmanageable sizes because collaboration often meant employees were sharing multiple versions of the same document.
When Microsoft introduced cloud attachments, it helped the end user challenge of versioning issues, as well as the IT challenge of managing the size of email inboxes, as storing links is much lighter than storing multiple versions of the entire document. However, the paradigm of “if you have the message, you have the attachment” was no longer true. A preservation policy on the message was no longer enough.
To help organizations more efficiently meet their regulatory obligations for discovery as well as more precisely find relevant content with context, eDiscovery (Premium) now supports the ability to discover the version of the document that was shared as a cloud attachment, at the time that it was shared. This helps ensure that the correct document information is available for eDiscovery processes without running into over preservation issues that come from having to preserve all content in SharePoint sites in case they are shared as cloud attachments. This feature is currently available in preview and will be generally available in the coming months. Watch this video to learn more.
Support for Microsoft Teams’ reactions within eDiscovery (Premium) now generally available across all Microsoft clouds
As we mentioned in a previous blog post, business critical information is shared via Teams, and reactions to messages are an important indicator of message acknowledgement, often communicating intent, and could be an important piece of case evidence.
This feature provides the ability to track reactions to specific Teams messages and conversations:
- Who reacted, with what reaction (thumbs up, heart, laugh, etc.) to what message at what time
- Reactions to edited and/or deleted messages for custodians on Legal Hold
This feature is now generally available across all Microsoft clouds. Learn more.
Figure 2: Reactions to Teams messages are now available for review as part of collected messages
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Graph APIs are now GA
We understand the processes and tools used to discover cloud content are unique to each organization. These include custom reports that align with business objectives or custom workflows used to discover cloud content. Organizations need scalable ways to repeat processes consistently and effectively, which is why we continue to invest in our Graph APIs to empower customers to build custom automation.
In July, we announced the general availability of the new eDiscovery Graph APIs, which provides various opportunities to improve workflows by:
- Enabling large collections from multiple apps and users
- Collecting Teams conversations and cloud attachments
- Automating workflows to enable repeatable and predictable management of complex and time sensitive processes
The eDiscovery API for Microsoft Graph is now generally available for U.S. Government clouds and will be begin rolling out over the coming weeks.
In addition to the Graph API for eDiscovery, Microsoft 365 admins can now connect third-party applications into their environments via Graph Connectors, so the content can be available for eDiscovery workflows including collections, review, and export. The capability is now in public preview.
User experience and productivity features
Storing and managing cloud content can be very complex but discovering that content shouldn’t be. We continue to focus and invest on improving usability so customers can better understand progress and drive efficiency across the discovery process.
Customer feedback is a critical component, and we appreciate suggestions on ways to continuously improve the eDiscovery solution to better meet the needs of our customers.
Several new enhancements are now generally available or rolling out over the coming weeks:
- eDiscovery admins can better understand the progress of Collections, statistics on what content contributed to changes between estimated items with hits and actual collected items, as well as commit the collection directly from the estimate without navigating through the entire collection wizard. Learn more
- eDiscovery (Premium) Collections and Processing experience has three core updates, including updates to embedded items handling, a new collection setting to include partially indexed items, and additional document metadata for SharePoint content. Learn more.
- The eDiscovery (Standard and Premium) jobs limit will be updated to provide users with better clarity on operational limits across the tenant. With fewer and simplified jobs related limits, users will have better flexibility in managing these limits and how they are shared among different job types across the eDiscovery workflow. Learn more
- Various UX and workflow enhancements including:
- The ability to mark an eDiscovery (Premium) case as a favorite (see Figure 3)
- User filter/group/sort/search persistence on various list pages (see Figure 4)
- The ability to quickly access common collection operations such as edit collection query, rerun estimate and commit collection
- Search and filtering capabilities for the metadata, cleaner metadata list value formatting, and row number indicator for documents in Review sets (see figure 5)
Figure 3: Mark a case as a favorite
Figure 4: User configured sort/filter/search view is persistent between sessions
Figure 5: Search and filter metadata in Review sets
Get started
We are excited to share two new resources to help our customers understand how to optimize your eDiscovery investment with Microsoft.
- First is a new White Paper, which outlines the challenges in the eDiscovery space and the key features of eDiscovery (Premium) that the Microsoft Legal team leverages to help save time and reduce eDiscovery costs.
- Second is the refreshed Interactive User Guides, which provides a step-by-step guide for using eDiscovery (Premium). Topics include: creating a case, identifying and preserving data sources, Teams workflows, creating a collection, reviewing case content, and exporting case content. The guide is now in a modular form for easier consumption.
In addition to these exciting new resources, you can sharpen, expand, and discover new skills and earn a free certification exam by completing one of seven unique Collections on Microsoft Learn. The challenge is on until November 9th so sign up and get started now to avoid missing a beat.
We are happy to share that there is now an easier way for eligible customers to try Microsoft Purview solutions directly in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal with a free trial. By enabling the trial in the compliance portal, you can quickly start using all capabilities of Microsoft Purview, including Insider Risk Management, Records Management, Audit, eDiscovery, Communication Compliance, Information Protection, Data Lifecycle Management, Data Loss Prevention, and Compliance Manager.
Visit your Microsoft Purview compliance portal for more details or check out the Microsoft Purview solutions trial (an active Microsoft 365 E3 subscription is required as a prerequisite).
To learn more about eDiscovery, visit our Microsoft documentation at http://aka.ms/eDiscoveryPremium, or our “Become an eDiscovery Ninja” page at https://aka.ms/ediscoveryninja
