Software Use Case No. 2: Electronic Discovery for the Thrifty

Summary:  How to offer Risk Mitigation Discovery on the Cheap for Files and Web Content?

In late 2011, a Customer with minimal funds required an immediate Risk Mitigation Audit of their On Premises SharePoint, Windows and UNIX File Servers, as well as Content in various Private Cloud locales.  After some research, Apache Lucene with Solr and SearchBlox seemed to work out well for this discovery parsimonious prototype fulfilling their immediate Electronic Discovery needs.

Features include Crawling of Cloud and On Premises HTTP Resources, File Servers and support for common File Types.  Hit Highlighting of crawled resources such as HTML (but not Microsoft Office Files), Query Logging, Extraction of Search results (XML), Filtering, and Index Replication.  A more complete Google mini comparison versus the SearchBlox with Solr Lucene add-on:

http://www.searchblox.com/comparison-of-searchblox-vs-google-mini

Lastly, if the Solution did grow beyond a stop-gap measure and the Customer did get some funds together for Support or Enhancement requests, Searchblox does have affordable plans starting at $500 Per Incident to Yearly plans ranging from $5k to $50k:

http://www.searchblox.com/support

Installation and Configuration was less than four hours.  Here are some basic screen captures of the User Interfaces:

Advanced Search

Search Results

Hit Highlighting

Audit Log Report of Queries

Hindsight (3 months later):  minimal Support was required for a relatively happy anonymous Customer.   Documentation, Install and Configuration were pleasant experiences.  Rushed designs and implementations are usually a bit stressful, but the Solution worked fine with an On Premise implementation and Cloud VM backup for the replicated Indices.  The lack of Advanced ACLs for the Collections and Key Words would usually cause me to pause, but in this case there was only one Customer representative running the queries.  If time and resources allowed, a more elegant front-end Search ACL and corresponding Audit Log Report design and implementation would have occurred.

But, that is hindsight, I recommend this free Solution for stop-gap Web and File Electronic Discovery needs, or, with enhancements, as the foundation of a general Crawl and Index Solution.  Best of luck to you and your Software enhancements.

Happy Friday, gpluft.

 

About these ads