Enterprise search vendor offers e-mail discovery

Recommind’s Decisiv Email automatically categorizes and files messages

Enterprise search vendor Recommind is taking on e-discovery with a product being released Tuesday that categorizes the massive amounts of unstructured data in e-mail.

The product, Decisiv Email, uses Recommind’s patented search algorithms to identify what each e-mail is about by looking at the sender and receiver’s identity, subject lines, and patterns of word within the body of the e-mail. If the system is able to properly identify the e-mail, it will place it in an appropriate category so it can be easily found later on. If it’s not clear where it belongs, the product prompts the user to select a category in which the e-mail can be filed.

If an e-mail is required during a lawsuit, the system provides a history of the message, including the names of all people who have read it.

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Enterprise search vendor Recommind is taking on e-discovery with a product being released Tuesday that categorizes the massive amounts of unstructured data in e-mail.

The product, Decisiv Email, uses Recommind’s patented search algorithms to identify what each e-mail is about by looking at the sender and receiver’s identity, subject lines, and patterns of word within the body of the e-mail. If the system is able to properly identify the e-mail, it will place it in an appropriate category so it can be easily found later on. If it’s not clear where it belongs, the product prompts the user to select a category in which the e-mail can be filed.

If an e-mail is required during a lawsuit, the system provides a history of the message, including the names of all people who have read it.

“It’s auditable,” says Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s vice president of marketing. “You can take this into a court of law and say this is exactly what happened with this message.”

Decisiv Email, which costs $300 per user for perpetual licenses, is being marketed as a solution for e-discovery, compliance, records management and information life-cycle management. Features include integration with Microsoft Office, automated tagging and filing of incoming and outgoing messages, the ability to keep e-mails in Outlook folders after they have been filed in back-end systems and asynchronous filing so users do not have to wait for each item to be categorized.

Carpenter says Decisiv Email goes beyond archiving products by offering automatic categorization and a folder system where e-mails can be sliced and diced in numerous ways.

But the product, while thorough, doesn’t seem to offer any functions that haven’t been made available in other products before, says analyst David Hill of the Mesabi Group.

“Recommind seems to offer a very thorough product, so the price of $300 per seat is probably reasonable,” Hill wrote in an e-mail. “The very breadth of what they do is probably unique, but no single feature or function stands out as unique. Archiving products coupled with the use of an eDiscovery tool can do very similar things.”

Competitors in e-discovery include Abrevity, Arkivio, FAST, Clearwell Systems, Index Engines, Kazeon, Scentric, StoredIQ and Zantaz.

Decisiv Email is not Recommind’s first crack at e-discovery. In January, the vendor released a version of its MindServer search and categorization platform that makes it easier for companies to secure electronic files potentially needed in litigation.

The first customer to deploy Decisiv Email is Mallesons Stephen Jaques, a commercial law firm in Australia and Asia, which uses the product to automatically tag and file all messages and attachments sent and received by 1,000 attorneys and 2,100 total users, according to Recommind.

Six other large law firms and enterprises are piloting the product. International law firm Bryan Cave LLP is getting ready use Decisiv Email on a limited basis, but it will take at least six months to set rules on how to categorize e-mails and fully deploy the software for the firm’s 2,000 users, says John Alber, who oversees information services and other technology initiatives for the company out of its St. Louis office.