On Wednesday, I participated in a  webinar with Larry Briggi of FTI Technology and Jim Zucker of Hogan Lovells.  The discussion centered on the intersection of rampant SharePoint adoption and the ongoing increase of electronic discovery.  During the webinar, which had over 300 participants, we conducted a few “polling questions” to see how the audience was being impacted on what we thought was a relatively new trend in the marketplace.   The most astonishing results came when we asked how many members of the audience had already been asked to preserve and collect SharePoint data during discovery.  The results are below:

• Nearly a third of respondents have already had to manage SharePoint as part of electronic discovery.  We have seen this movie before–it is called e-mail.  New content type, new place to store important data.  It’s only going to get worse.
• Over a third of respondents are expecting to deal with SharePoint as part of electronic discovery.  This begs the question–are you prepared or are you going to wait until it happens and figure it out?  After getting caught off guard with many requests for e-mail, isn’t it time to be proactive?
• Twenty-three percent of respondents have discussed it or talked about it.  See bullets number one and two as reasons why it’s time to turn words into action before your adversary does.

Read more of Brian’s blog entries at IT BULLETins.

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