SharePoint sites will have large amount of data in documents,
Social data, web pages and email messages. We may have some legal risks with keeping the data
and searching the data. In that scenario we can search and export it into
usable format. In SharePoint, eDiscovery capabilities will help to achieve the requirement. eDiscovery
requires searching for documents, sites, pages, emails from all the email
servers, file servers and collect the data as per the format of legal case. We
can simply define the eDiscovery as “the process of finding, preserving, analyzing
and producing the content in electronic format as required format of
investigators.”
Microsoft people introduced the Hold and eDiscovery feature
in SharePoint 2010. In SharePoint 2013 added few capabilities to reduce the
cost and complexity of the discovery. Following are the new features introduced
in SharePoint 2013,
- eDiscovery center: it’s SharePoint site used to manage preservation, search and export the content stored in Exchange and SharePoint in SharePoint farms and Exchange servers
- SharePoint In-Place hold: SharePoint In-Place hold will keep all SharePoint sites. It protects all the pages, documents, list items in the site and allows users to edit and delete the content.
- Exchange In-Place hold: like SharePoint In-Place hold, Exchange In-Place hold will keep exchange mail boxes. It protects all the mail box content as same UI and API uses for SharePoint In-Place hold.
- Query Based Preservation: it allows users to apply query filters to exchange mail boxes and SharePoint sites.
We have eDiscovery site collection in SharePoint 2013,
contains identification, preservation, processing and analysis. eDiscovery
center is also available in Office 365 site and can be connected to exchange.
So that we can conduct the eDiscovery in SharePoint site and Exchange, Lync. In
eDiscovery site collection we can create case sites that used for manage
in-place holds and queries.
eDiscovery will use Search Service Application to crawl
SharePoint farm. We will create a central search service farm that crawl all
the data from all the SharePoint farms. We can use central level search service
or specific region service. To crawl the SharePoint farm, search first uses the
service application proxy. eDiscovery center uses the proxy to connect and send
the preservation to SharePoint sites in SharePoint farms. We should have
search service infrastructure to configure the eDiscovery feature.
Using In-Place Hold: as explained earlier we can In-Place
hold to manage the data in SharePoint and exchange. Content will spread across
different locations like email servers, files, CMS. In previous SharePoint
versions we have a challenge for e-discovery because of many types of content
like pages, lists. So it is difficult to export offline data. In SharePoint
2013 it is easy to maintain with eDiscovery sets. eDiscovery sets will identify
exchange mail boxes and SharePoint sites and group them together, applies the
filter to them.
Querying: We can identify the data by using querying in the
eDiscovery process. eDiscovery query page will help us to identify and reduce
the data by using keyword syntax, property restriction and refinements. We can
preview exchange and SharePoint content to identify the results.
Data Export: The main thing in eDiscovery system is to
export the data (SharePoint farm and Exchange server data). We can export the
data after finalizing the query by selecting the options. We can download the
search results to the machine. By using export option we can remove the
duplicate Exchange content and document versions.
