The Google Mini gets a Not-so-mini Upgrade
by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager -
May 27
Our small but powerful blue box has been working hard in companies all over the world, and now it works even harder so you don't have to. We've outfitted the Mini with some great new features:
- Almost all employees store files on shared servers so other employees can access them. The Mini is now able to securely crawl and serve these file shares. You'll be able to quickly find shared information across the company instead of having to ask a hundred people or, worse, do their work over.
- Many customers have told us that they want to tell us which documents are more valuable within their own companies -- for instance, published marketing collateral is more authoritative than the first draft. Sometimes, files from a certain server are less important and shouldn't clog the search results page. Source Biasing enables users to give us URL patterns and tell us if they should be weighted higher or lower.
- Two very similar documents: One from 1998, one from 2008. We're guessing you're not as interested in the one written 10 years ago. If so, you'll like our new Date Biasing feature, which gives greater (or lesser) importance to newer (or older) documents.
- Finally, in an effort to continue the rapid international growth of the Google Mini, we are adding support for six more languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish) in the Mini's administrative screens and help documentation.
If you don't have a Google Mini but are ready to try it, please get in touch. If you already have a Google Mini, the new features will be available to you for download from your support site shortly.
Enjoy!
Getting proactive about e-discovery
by Bill Kee, Product Marketing -
May 20
Here at Google Enterprise, one thing we focus on is making the web-based applications that people use at home more suitable for the workplace. This often means providing administrative or specialized security features to meet the specific challenges faced by organizations. One challenge that organizations face is legal discovery of electronically stored information, particularly email. Several factors have conspired to make this process, known as "e-discovery," difficult and costly.
Foremost are the growth in volume of electronically stored information (think at least 1GB of email per employee per year) and changes to rules that guide the discovery process (pdf), which have set new expectations for how companies should treat electronic information during the course of a lawsuit. As a result, many organizations find themselves scrambling to locate and preserve email in response to impending litigation, often spending excessively in the course of doing so. Given the complexity involved, it can cost $1,800 to shepherd a gigabyte of email through the discovery process.
There are things you can do, however, to transform e-discovery from a fire drill into a predictable business process. A good start is to be proactive about email archiving to ensure that a comprehensive and centralized record of all email is maintained and accessible to administrators. Setting policies regarding the retention of email is also a good idea. It's with this in mind that we've included an email archiving application with Google Apps Premier Edition (also available for non-Google Apps customers). It's also useful to understand how email archiving fits into the rest of the e-discovery process; a good framework for approaching this can be found in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).
To learn more about e-discovery, the EDRM, and steps you can take to be proactive, join us for a free webinar we're holding on June 3 with Clearwell Systems, a technology company focusing on e-discovery.
