As of this writing, it's impossible to escape daily news about the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP will owe $20 billion or more for cleanup costs, and litigants on the federal and state levels are lining up for compensation, preparing to ask, "What did BP know and when did they know it?" Amid all this news, there is one term we haven't yet heard that will have a large role in this saga as it plays out: e-discovery, which refers to the pretrial action in a lawsuit where parties can request or compel digital documents as evidence.

As the term suggests, e-discovery applies to electronic documents, also called "electronically stored information" (ESI) of any format or kind. It was not until December 2006 that the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure formally extended legal discovery to ESI. In the ensuing 4 years, organizations have become increasingly aware of e-discovery requirements and challenges. Companies and agencies have many issues competing for their attention and scarce resources, and it takes time and money to develop new business and information management processes to prepare a solid foundation for e-discovery. Then there is the sheer immensity of the content that could be discoverable: terabytes or more of ESI, everything from Office files to blog posts, email, instant messages, and rich media. Lastly, e-discovery preparations and software work best if your business has well-established digital content and records management procedures in place. Of the three hurdles to good e-discovery practices, I believe the last is most daunting.

Still, an ostrich approach won't work. Almost every enterprise, public and private, is sued, often repeatedly. Since 2006, lawsuits likely include pretrial meetings between the parties to review potential electronic evidence, and the costs of that process are mind-numbing. Dr. Johannes Scholtes, chief strategy officer for ZyLAB, says that "Storing 250GB of electronic information costs you only $250. Hiring an external firm to process and review it can cost you upwards of $1 million." And that's just the beginning of the litigation costs.

As you begin developing an e-discovery strategy, you will wonder which issues to consider first as you ready your firm for this inevitable nightmare. Although it is not an easy read, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model provides a high-level overview of the e-discovery lifecycle. Founded in 2007, the EDRM group who created the model provides details at http://edrm.net. The model starts with information management-the ocean of digital information-and provides an e-discovery process road map to winnow it down. I contacted four vendors with leading edge e-discovery solutions for their views on the biggest issues in e-discovery planning, and each of these vendors participates in the EDRM group.

Ursula Talley, VP of marketing at StoredIQ, asserts that "e-discovery can only become a predictable, repeatable, and cost-effective business process if data is truly managed." Talley also notes that cost predictability is the main driver in selecting an e-discovery solution, and "e-discovery is not a legal problem; it is an IT problem." Andrew Cohen, EMC's VP and general manager of e-discovery and compliance, stresses a need to consider the sheer size of ESI repositories. Cohen pointed out that an e-discovery "product must be able to scale" across swaths of tens, or even hundreds, of terabytes of information.

Craig Carpenter, VP and general counsel of Recommind, says that law firms are slowly starting to take a "proactive approach to e-discovery to reduce the time and cost associated with large e-discovery projects." He says that the Toyota pedal recall shows the disadvantage of not being proactive. "Toyota's issues could have been avoided had they been able to gain insight into their information quickly and accurately." However, traditional e-discovery products-if they simply emphasize traditional search techniques-become overwhelmed with the volumes of information to be analyzed. Products with predictive text analytics can "automatically identify key documents, people, and phrases" to provide important insights into document collections before legal review begins. Another key aspect of e-discovery costs is whether or not the licensed software is based on the amount of data to analyze. ZyLAB's Scholtes says that "very few vendors provide software under a perpetual non-volume bound license."

Like the BP spill, e-discovery can be extremely damaging and costly. Proactive cost avoidance, better information management, and related goals can drive an e-discovery initiative. Who foresaw and was ready with remediation plans for the BP oil spill? Apparently, nobody. So before you have a crisis on your hands, take the time to develop your e-discovery readiness plan.

Connotate, Inc., a provider of data collection solutions for the web, announced the release of Agent Community V3, the latest iteration of its flagship web data monitoring and collection solution. Agent Community allows non-technical users to capture and analyze dynamic Web content and data via a patented visual abstraction technique and easy-to-use interface. This version includes new features such as increased automated Web data collection capabilities, improved text analytics, "slice-and-dice" Agent subscription and management views, along with compatibility with the Mozilla Firefox Web browser.

The Agent Community solution provides scalability, reliability and resiliency to help drive strategic value by delivering targeted dynamic Web content and data in a cost-effective manner. Agent Community is built on the foundation of Connotate's "Intelligent Agent" technology that enables a non-technical user to create Agents for tracking, collecting, and updating data from a Web page, spreadsheet, database, PDF file, email and/or legacy application data source.

(www.connotate.com)

StoredIQ, a provider of information management and eDiscovery solutions, announced that its Intelligent Information Management Platform integration with Microsoft SharePoint has been enhanced and extended to provide complete support for SharePoint.

According to StoredIQ, its solution fully supports all core SharePoint object types, including Blog Posts, Comments, Discussion Board, Calendar, Tasks, Project Tasks, Contacts, Wiki Pages, Issue Tracker, Announcements, Survey, Links, Document Libraries, Picture Libraries, and Records Center, and all associated metadata. The updated integration also supports nested SharePoint content.

The updated connector is available immediately with the release of StoredIQ 6.1.

(www.storediq.com)

Endeca Technologies announced Endeca Latitude, a business intelligence (BI) product that combines simple search with BI functionality to aid decision-making in enterprise organizations. Endeca Latitude serves as a central platform through which a variety of BI applications dealing with dynamic data can be deployed, with the Endeca Latitude platform facilitating a user-friendly experience. Endeca Latitude is powered the MDEX Engine, a hybrid search-analytical database constructed to bring together information required to make a particular business decision, regardless of format or source.

The British Transport Police, the force responsible for policing Britain's railways, has selected an application developed with Endeca Latitude to enhance its transit intelligence and reporting-Endeca for Force Intellgence. Endeca reports that the British Transport Police, in conjunction with Capgemini, a provider of consulting, technology, and outsourcing services, plans to use the application in order to help streamline their operations, surveillance, and research systems.

For more information, visit EContent's Blog to read "Endeca Buys into Business Intelligence."

(www.endeca.com; www.btp.police.uk)

The U.S. International Trade Commission knew from a survey that users had difficulty finding information on its website. The independent federal agency wanted to replace its search software to improve its functionality, and sought a solution that would fit its needs and budget, as well as be easy to administer. After reviewing a number of options, the Commission chose CloudView from Exalead.

Joel Moeller, e-business division manager at the U.S. International Trade Commission, says, "We picked Exalead to support searching our website because it met all of our requirements. Our production systems run on different platforms, some Windows and some Linux, which CloudView supported. Our user feedback now indicates that the search functionality on our site has improved and information is easier to find."

The solution is being deployed in two ways at the Trade Commission:

• It powers the search functionality of its website, which offers users access to more than 40,000 documents in a range of formats including PDF, spreadsheets, Microsoft Word and Word Perfect files.
• The Commission is expanding the implementation so that staff members will use CloudView internally, allowing them to search file systems, folders and data repositories.

According to Exalead, its solution:

• increases the value and range of information;
• boosts system performance and reduces costs via database offloading, work force decentralization and customer self-service;
• increases agility with a scalable SOA architecture and support for standard Web technologies; and
• simplifies usage with Web-style speed and ease.

Attensity has launched Attensity Respond for Social Media, which is designed to extend the value of the company’s solution for social media monitoring and measurement, Attensity360.

The combination of Attensity360 with Attensity Respond For Social Media monitors millions of Tweets, Facebook posts, review sites, blogs and more. It then analyzes and classifies them using semantic technologies to identify what is actionable. Attensity Respond for Social Media next routes each message to the best person or group in an enterprise for response in near real time. This reportedly allows enterprises to improve customer satisfaction, reduce customer attrition and support costs, and identify product and competitive issues and opportunities early.

Respond for Social Media also integrates with leading customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to allow every interaction to be tracked at the customer level. It enables service agents to improve their customer interactions by providing access to valuable customer profile data in social media as well as in the CRM system. Response times and content are tracked in the customer record for future reference and a full set of interaction management reports are included.

Endeca has unveiled Endeca Latitude, a new business intelligence (BI) product that combines search and BI to improve daily decision-making in the enterprise. Based on a hybrid search-analytical database, Endeca Latitude IT is a centralized platform for rapidly deploying BI applications on diverse and changing data.

The company highlights the following three features:

No data left behind. At the heart of Endeca Latitude is MDEX Engine technology, a hybrid search-analytical database designed to bring together all of the information required for making critical business decisions, regardless of the original type, format or source. With support for IT-managed data governance and data security, as well as industry standards such as XQuery, XML and SOA, the MDEX Engine is designed to fit easily into existing enterprise architectures.

Consumer ease of use. The Discovery Framework, part of Endeca Latitude, provides a library of components that deliver advanced search capabilities, Endeca's Guided Navigation experience, rich visualizations and analytics for the rapid configuration of discovery applications. This enables IT organizations to respond to changing business needs by redesigning reports and dashboards in minutes, incorporating diverse data sources in days and deploying entirely new applications in just a few weeks, the company says.

Agile delivery. Endeca says Latitude supports a nimble approach to deployment that reduces the data modeling and integration, as well as application development inherent in traditional software deployments. The integration capabilities are facilitated through the Endeca Content Acquisition System (CAS), an extensible framework for ingest of a broad range of unstructured content, and through support for best-of-breed data adapters and ETL tools.

Digital Reef, a provider of ediscovery and digital information governance software, released a new version of its ediscovery software platform. The new Portable Collections capability enables users to quickly create large, case-specific portable matters that can be distributed to ediscovery data centers of legal service providers, enterprise companies, and law firms. The Digital Reef eDiscovery Portable Collections feature also creates a "package matter," containing virtual indexes, complete search meta-data and tags, analytic collections and views, and selected files within a case. This package can be archived and restored later or moved into another Digital Reef environment.

In addition to the Portable Collections, new features of the latest version of the Digital Reef eDiscovery and ECA application include interactive reports for exploring large volumes of data, enhanced export options, a configurable application guide, and an automatic custodian generator.

(www.digitalreefinc.com)

Dow Jones & Company has unveiled a new offering designed to provide management consultants with the focused news, information and search tools they need to gain insight into prospect and customer industries and issues around the globe. Dow Jones Consultant culls information from 28,000 news sources and 18 million company profiles, which is delivered via newsletters or a single dashboard to equip firms with information to demonstrate their value to clients, build relationships, become better counselors and ultimately improve their practices.

Dow Jones Consultant includes:

• exclusive access to the editorial viewpoint of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, providing the information consultants need to ensure their advice is timely, targeted and insightful. It also provides information about emerging business, economic and technology trends and risks for clients and projects, with exclusive industry-relevant company fundamentals, news and analysis.
• in-depth information on more than 18 million companies and 30 industries.
• relationship mapping technology to connect consultants with more than 36 million executives to significantly expand their professional networks and uncover new business opportunities.

The information in Dow Jones Consultant can be filtered by practice area, industry, region and company to help firms cut through information overload and get just the information they need. The newsletters or dashboard are available via the Web, mobile device or company intranet and can be customized and integrated directly into the applications consultants use every day.

MetaVis Technologies has launched Cloud Classifier for SharePoint 2010, which allows SharePoint 2010 users to tag and classify multiple items directly from the SharePoint user interface. MetaVis says users have more control to add the appropriate metadata to documents, extending the value of SharePoint search and improving the user experience.

MetaVis says SharePoint 2010 provides tagging and classification technology but is limited to individual items, thereby making classifying multiple documents time-consuming and tedious. MetaVis Cloud Classifier allows users to select multiple documents from SharePoint sites, libraries, lists or search results and classify in bulk. Users can also create templates to help classify content for specific projects or activities, further simplifying the process. By making classification easy for the user, content becomes more findable and accessible.

In addition to basic tagging, Cloud Classifier allows users to:

• change content types for multiple selected documents and specify field values;
• e-map fields to copy metadata values from one field to another;
• enter values directly or select them from standard SharePoint columns, including Managed Metadata Fields linked to Term Sets; and
• perform metadata enhancement and data classification in SharePoint sites.

TheBrain Technologies has released PersonalBrain 6, which augments PersonalBrain publishing and enables synchronization of Brains across multiple platforms and machines.

PersonalBrain 6 has more than 100 new features and enhancements including:

One-click WebBrain publishing. WebBrain allows users to publish publicly, unlisted or privately. Send links to key Thoughts or areas in their Brain and track comments from the WebBrain.com community. Published Brains can be embedded in blogs or Web sites and are searched and indexed by all search engines.

Secure synchronization and backup. Brains can be accessed across multiple machines, platforms and locations. One-step WebBrain publishing gives users and their coworkers instant access to information online or offline on the desktop.

Increased performance. Navigation speed has been doubled and powered by an augmented database backend. PersonalBrain's user interface enables users to visually navigate across all relevant information quickly and intelligently.

Intranet DASHBOARD (iD), developers of the similarly named software platform, released the SharePoint Connector, which offers increased collaboration with Microsoft SharePoint. The application is the first to be developed using the new iD API, which allows for the extension and customization of iD. With the SharePoint Connector, SharePoint materials such as Task Lists and Document Libraries can be displayed within iD's intranet interface.

iD is a software development platform used for the creation of professional intranets. The platform includes 40 out-of-the-box business applications, such as Web CMS, Enterprise Search, and the new API.

(www.intranetdashboard.com)