Putting an End to Digital Dumpster Diving

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Looking for a particular file or a set of files related to a particular topic, such as in e-discovery, is one of the most time-consuming and thankless tasks in IT. Users tend to think everything is automated, so finding the file should be a piece of cake. More than likely, though, the file is on a tape somewhere that is probably corrupted. There might be a copy, but which file system or database on which it actually resides is anybody's guess.

The folks at ZL Technologies want to put an end to digital dumpster diving with Unified Archive, an enterprise search platform that indexes every piece of information in the enterprise, then uses a search engine crawler to help people find what they need.

According to Steve Chan, vice president of business development for ZL Technologies, Unified Archive is a lot easier to deploy than search technologies such as Google's that are optimized for the Web rather than the enterprise.

For example, ZL Technologies just ran a test in which it searched 3 million e-mails taken from 100 Enron employee mailboxes. In the test, Unified Archive found all relevant documents related to 77 search conditions, the company said.

The bad news for the legal department is that these technologies and others like it mean that no one can really claim that they can’t find a file requested in a lawsuit. But the really good news for IT is that the technology empowers users, especially the legal department, to find the files themselves.