GroupWise Guru

2 Ways to Look at Email Discovery with GroupWise

Matt Ray — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:40:55 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I’ve talked to a lot of people about it. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 2 ways to go about doing email discovery and forensics work, particularly when it comes to litigation support type work. The first way is the way that I end up doing a lot of my work. I get a call from a LitSupport company who has a bunch of data they were sent and it’s all GroupWise. I help them extract the data using my GroupWise expertise and the tools that I have. We tend to extract everything to PST since that’s what most LitSupport companies want it in. This is the Post-extraction method. It tends to cost a lot of money in Consulting and LitSupport dollars. And it’s not very good for companies (well, other than companies like mine and Lit Support companies who make money doing the extraction work) who have multiple litigation requirements that they have to fulfill.

The other way to handle this is pre-emptively, or before it happens, the customer can setup (or we can help them set it up) an archiving solution such as GWAVA Reveal and/or Retain, Nexic Discovery, or Messaging Architects GWArchive. These products all support GroupWise natively and allow the customer to do searches and extract those searches to a readable and searchable format. If a judge tells you to provide all the mail from 2006 that includes the words balogna, you can easily go to any of these tools and do a search on those keywords and then export them to a CD and deliver it. You don’t have to get a Consultant involved (although sometimes the objectivity of a consultant is required) or at least it shouldn’t take the consultant as long to take care of if you’re already got an archive that you can search and prepare for them. Cost-wise, each of these products are sold on a per-user basis, but by paying up front to get these types of solutions in place and ready to go, you can avoid the costly attorney & consulting fees that come around the other side of a litigation situation.

So, you might want to take a look at what your email retention requirements are (check with the regulatory board in your industry to find out what they are) and get ready ahead of time by using an Enterprise Archiving solution to get ahead of the curve. The other huge benefit of using tools like these is you can get a bunch of that old GroupWise email off of your production GroupWise environment, and on to an online archive that your users can refer to, but it wont’ be hogging up your GroupWise System.

Let us know if we can help you install and configure any of these types of solutions. We’ve installed them in lots of companies across the nation and could easily be scheduled to come help you.

Until that time, keep sending those emails, and let us know how we can help you get your GroupWise System in the best shape possible.

Matt Ray, Owner, Prinicipal Consultant, MC Consulting – GroupWiseGuru.com

GroupWise Gurus listed as a Recommended Consultants with AVST

Matt Ray — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:05:56 +0000

In a recent addition to their website, AVST, listed GroupWiseGuru as their recommended GroupWise Consultants. See this link for the addition:

http://www.avst.com/company/recommendedconsultants.asp

More about AVST:

Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions for businesses of all sizes. Through its world-class unified communications platform, CallXpress®, and its innovative speech application module, Seneca®, AVST offers the industry’s most powerful suite of second generation communications solutions including voice messaging, unified messaging, speech-enabled applications (including automated attendant and hands-free mobile worker access), and call processing (including embedded IVR). More can be found about AVST by going to their website, http://www.avst.com

Remember that MC Consulting – GroupWiseGuru.com is here for all of your GroupWise needs. Whether that includes health checks, upgrades, migrations, expert witness, litigation support, or forensics & discovery. We do GroupWise!

Recreate User Database - A GW Zombification Tool!

Matt Ray — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:07:46 +0000

It’s almost Halloween time and there’s always talk about Zombies at Halloween time, right? Besides being a GroupWise expert, I’ve also spent a lot of time in Haiti (with Healing Hands for Haiti, my hobby, you might say) where most of the “real” zombies live, I’m told. But what you may not know is that we can create zombies of our own in GroupWise. To explain, I need to explain to you a little bit about GroupWise and how it works.

GroupWise uses a set of shared databases to store and represent messages to users. There are a set of user databases (ofuser directory), a set of message databases (ofmsg directory), and a directory for attachments (offiles). When I send an email to someone else in my post office with GroupWise, three things happen (I’m definitely simplifying the process here). First, I insert the actual message in my assigned message database. Then I create 2 pointers to that message. The first is in my Sent Items folder and the second is in the recipient’s Inbox folder. If there’s an attachment to the message it gets stored in offiles directory, but that’s besides the point.

So, let’s say my recipient doesn’t want the email any longer. He deletes the message and then empties it. However, until I delete the message and empty it from my Sent Items folder, that message, although dead to my recipient, is still living. From my recipient’s perspective, it’s buried, but really, “It’s A-L-I-V-E-!” (insert a wicked sounding laugh here).

So, who cares whether GroupWise naturally creates zombies of messages or not? Well, when you’re going through email for litigation purposes and you can’t find the email you’re looking for, perhaps the reason it’s not there is because the recipient deleted it from his mailbox. But, as long as the sender didn’t delete it from their Sent Items folder (something that almost nobody does, by the way, because they don’t think to delete sent items) you can run a process called, “Recreate User Database,” or something I like to call, “Bringing emails back from the dead!” The recreate user database will dump all the emails into the recipient’s Cabinet folder, even the ones that were in sub-folders before, but there’s a good chance you’ll get many more emails recreated than what you had originally. By the way, it also dumps all the Sent Items in that same folder. Once they’re in that folder you can do your keyword searches or extract the mailbox to PST and search it that way.
I hope this helps in your email searching. If you need more information about creating zombie emails, please don’t hesitate to contact us for assistance. For litigation/e-discovery purposes, or for any of your GroupWise Consulting needs, call us and we’ll help you get the job done, even if it means bringing emails back from the grave!
Matt Ray, GroupWise Guru, mray@groupwiseguru.com, 661.885.2699

GroupWise Litigation Support with version 4.X - Part Deux

Matt Ray — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:45:48 +0000

Last week I wrote about us working on a 4.x system and having all the passwords set. Luckily for us, someone had the old password and we were able to get into all the domains and create userlists to the customer could then pick out which custodians they needed us to extract from each dataset. However, along the road, we also discovered that the Primary Domains could be reset using GroupWise 5.2. This is partly what I had remembered from my 5.2 days. The inital release of 5.2 had a bug in it where it would allow you to access the 4.x domain without putting in a password. Shortly after this release, another release came out that did require you to put in the password, however, using this release of 5.2, we were able to get past the password issue we were facing. For more information see the previous post.

Hope this is helpful to you. As always, if you need help with your GroupWise Litigation Support project, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Matt Ray, mray@gwguru.com

GroupWise Litigation Support with version 4.X

Matt Ray — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 01:41:43 +0000

We ran across a project this week where the customer had a bunch of old data from 1997, 1998, and 1999. It was all GroupWise 4.X data. Back in the good old 4.X days (yes, we were working on GroupWise back then (actually back to Office 3.x!)) you didn’t have edirectory providing security and authentication as it was WordPerfect security, not Novell security. However, WordPerfect allowed your domains to be secure by having a password to protect them. This was fine and dandy back then, but it poses a difficult issue when doing Litigation Support or eDiscovery on that version of GroupWise. That’s why when you want to do GroupWise Litigation Support on 4.x, you really need to ask if they have the domain password. If they have multiple domains, you’ll need to get them all if you want to access mail from all of them. The only other way to get around this issue is to send the domain.db into Novell and have the password reset. Unfortunately, this would be quite cost prohibitive, particularly when we were talking about 80+ domains!

If you run across any other interesting GroupWise Litigation Support issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to help you with all of your GroupWise needs.

Matt

GroupWise Archiving… you can’t ignore it forever!

Matt Ray — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 22:05:27 +0000

GroupWise Archiving

Sarbanes-Oxley got you down? HIPAA causing a pain in your side? Are you being required to maintain all of your documents, including your email, and you’re not sure how to go about it or don’t have time to do it? Or maybe you’re one of the ones who thinks that this isn’t going to apply to you. Trust us, eventually, you’ll need to provide something to the court system and instead of having easy access to it, you’ll be digging through old backup tapes, hoping you have the right tape drive and backup software to get everything restored correctly, and then you’ll be reverse engineering GroupWise just to get into it. We’ve done this with hundreds of companies and most of them end up turning it over to us to do because they don’t want to mess around with it.

Well, beat the rush by putting an Enterprise Level Archiving System in place and then you’ll kill 2 birds with 1 stone. 1st off, you’ll be ready if you ever have to provide old emails for litigation purposes and 2ndly, by providing an enterprise level archiving solution, you can now enforce that cleannup policy you’ve been wanting to put in place for years, but nobody would let you.

Let us help you to put an Enterprise Archiving Solution in place today. Your users will love you. Your CEOs will love you. Your legal team will love you! And your GroupWise System will love you as you unclog its arteries from all of the email in the system since 1995! Contact us today to find out more!

GroupWise Litigation Support!

Matt Ray — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:39:40 +0000

Have you been given a GroupWise project to grab all the files from backup and extract mailboxes? Has it been difficult? Let us help you by providing GroupWise expertise in this area. We’ve been doing GroupWise Litigation Support for several years now, providing law firms & litigation support companies with GroupWise expertise on their toughest GroupWise Litigation Support Projects. We’ve worked with so many companies to provide this support that we went ahead and documented what you need to get started. This doc tells you what files and directories are required to get things going right.

GroupWise Data Recovery 101

Migrate your GroupWise System to LINUX!

Matt Ray — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:31:17 +0000

Have you been putting off migrating your GroupWise System to LINUX until you can take the time to “learn LINUX?” Why wait? We can come help you migrate and provide you training while we do it. Still not comfortable? We’ll provide a post-migration support contract to help you work through the transition. Call us today and we’ll be glad to work with you on your GroupWise LINUX Migration!

GroupWise Administrator Backup, a new offering!

Matt Ray — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:28:39 +0000

MC Consulting – GroupWiseGuru.com is now offering a GroupWise Administrator Backup where we back your GroupWise Administrator up when he or she goes on vacation or goes to training. We’ll get to know your environment, work with your Administrator, document your system, so that when they leave for a week or two, you aren’t left in the dark! We’ll know your GroupWise System well enough that we can resolve issues or work on projects, whatever you need. We can also do yearly health checks and status reports if you’d like. It’s totally customizable and will work how you need it to work. Contact us today to get more information!

GroupWise 7 SP2 ships!

Matt Ray — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:38:25 +0000

GroupWise 7 SP2 ships!

GroupWise 7 SP2 has recently shipped and it has a lot of fixes in it! You can download the NLM/NT version by going to this link:

http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=8RF83go0nZg~

Download the LINUX version by going here:

http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=O9ucpbS1bK0~

You should read through the list of fixes if you’ve got some time on your hands. But one of the most important fixes is a Web Access vulnerability issue. Read more about it here:

http://secunia.com/advisories/24944/

I’ve installed SP2 for a few customers and overall it has gone really well. No major issues have occurred. And, the client is a lot snappier, based on my experience. If you need help with applying the Support Pack, don’t hesitate to call us. We have accellerated upgrades that can help you apply the support pack within a few hours (backend only) and very little downtime. In fact, most people are surprised by how little down time we have when we upgrade them from 6.5 to 7 or even 6.0. We just did an upgrade from 6.03 to 7.01 IR1 2 weeks ago for a large school system and we had 5 minutes of downtime. Of course, this is an in place upgrade. If you need to upgrade your servers and do an across the wire migration it will take longer, but we’ve done one of those with as little as 30 minutes of downtime. The nice thing about that is you could do it during lunch, which we did.

Make sure you call us for all your upgrade and migration needs. We’d also be glad to help you with an enterprise level archiving solution. See our next post.