A product coming out today from the e-discovery company CloudNine makes it easy to collect email and attachments from Office 365 email custodians and Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage files.
Called CloudNine Collection Manager, the product is designed to be easy enough for first-time collectors to use yet powerful enough for e-discovery professionals handling complex native collections.
It installs locally as a desktop utility and defensibly performs native data collections either from a single email account or across multiple mailboxes. It connects to both Office 365 and OneDrive data sources, and the collection includes documents linked from email messages, something few other collection products can do.
Sold as a stand-alone product, it can be used without regard to whether the customer uses other CloudNine software. However, for those who are CloudNine users, Collection Manager integrates directly with CloudNine Explore, so the collected data can be output into Explore with a single click, where the data is automatically processed and analyzed and ready for lawyers to search and review.
For those who use other companies’ e-discovery platforms, the collected data is output to a universally compatible read-only .PST file, which can then be output to the platform of choice.
Yesterday, CloudNine’s Jared Greene, product owner for Collection Manager, gave me a demonstration of the product. It uses a wizard interface to guide collectors as they browse and select one or multiple data custodians, filter by date, and extract data to desired formats such as PSTs or zip files.
Greene said CloudNine developed the product because many of its customers said that Office 365 collection is big pain point for them, but there are few products in the market that can do it in a forensically defensible manner.
Possibly the hardest part of a collection is transferring the credentials to access the accounts.
