It’s almost a given now that we must take into account Legal Discovery. Governance and technology comes into play and everyone must keep content for a specific period of time. All that content must be discoverable wherever it may lie. When you move your entire collaboration and social world to the cloud, that requirement comes along with it. While it may be over a month old, CMSWire has an article on, “Will Your e-Discovery Vendor Support Your Move to SharePoint Online?” The author, Tom Petrocelli, doesn’t get into a lot of detail although he does point out a few vendors who already support e-Discovery for SharePoint online. He does however, had some interesting points.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that Microsoft is making a major shift to the cloud.
…
The responsibility to preserve and hand over certain data during a lawsuit doesn’t suddenly disappear because the data is kept in an online repository. It is still discoverable data.
This is, of course, not just a problem for SharePoint Online. The problem is even worse for newer online file services such as Box, Google Drive and Dropbox. At least with SharePoint Online, corporate IT knows it’s there.
Luckily for corporate attorneys, SharePoint Online 2013 has support for e-discovery queries and preservation. Unfortunately, only some e-discovery software vendors are providing access to cloud data stores such as SharePoint Online.
Doubtless almost every single e-Discovery vendor is working on a solution. Until they do, you need to take into account how this will work online.
