Steamd

Yesterday, I read an article on Ars Technica that really made me laugh:

Leaked memo: e-mail recovery will outlast Bush presidency

In a nutshell, millions of emails were lost between 2003 and 2005 for which thousands of them will likely never be recovered. The reason? Because the Bush IT shop decided to use Microsoft Exchange:

Archiving of government e-mail communications is required by federal law, yet the Bush administration has struggled since 2002 to comply with the requirement. The administration inherited a working archival system from the Clinton White House. But when the Bush IT shop decided to switch from a Lotus Notes-based e-mail system to one based on Microsoft Exchange, it broke compatibility with that software. Since then, the White House has repeatedly tried and failed to develop a new system. It first tried to retrofit the old Notes-based system to work with Exchange, but concluded that the approach was unworkable. It then took bids to design a new Exchange-based archiving system. According to one whistleblower, that system was finalized in 2006, but was reportedly mothballed at the last minute by White House CIO Theresa Payton, who cited vague performance concerns.

This is so laughable that it isn’t even funny. They ended up trying to implement a manual solution using the journaling feature in Outlook and Exchange. Not only is the Bush administration incompetent…but so is the IT staff! I only have two words for the Bush IT Administrator: Backup Exec!

I was an IT Supervisor at a small architectural firm for almost four years and one of the things I did while I was there was deploy an Exchange 2003 server. We were well aware of the requirement to backup and archive any email due to discoverability laws in effect that would require any and all email and documents to be put into question should a lawsuit occur. Thus backups were critical to the successful deployment of the server. If backups didn’t work we couldn’t deploy it. It was that simple.

The solution for us was Backup Exec. Not only did it allow us to do a full backup of our files every week with incrementals throughout the week but it also allowed us both full and incremental backups of our Exchange mailboxes as well. Although recovery was a pain in the ass, it was possible to restore a mailbox in its entirety should the need arise. Newer versions of Backup Exec are capable of more granular restore options, even down to the restoration of just a single email.

Even then, archiving email was a pain in the ass because everyone wanted to keep everything in their inbox. The question was: How do we archive email without it being in someone’s mailbox? The solution would have to be something that allowed you to move email out of your mailbox and into a repository that allowed for backing up and archiving email. Many solutions exist but the one we ended up deploying also happened to be a good project management solution: Newforma. Not only could employees store old emails for future retrieval but they could store them by project along with other important features that helped in managing the project. And since each email was stored in a file system as unique individual files, keeping routine backups was a no-brainer. Also, retrieving an old email couldn’t be any easier since all of it was indexed and completely searchable, even attachments. Newforma is just one solution for email archiving but I’m sure something just as robust and easy to use exists as well.

You’d think that out of any IT environment that the White House would have the best IT staff money can buy, right? I mean, this is the top-level of our government we’re talking about here. I can’t think of any place where the IT needs would require more attention and more care. The Bush IT staff can blame their problems on anything they want but I know better. Just because they’re using Microsoft Exchange doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way to keep routing backups of all emails. That simply just isn’t the case. I just can’t believe that the IT staff in the White House is as incompetent as the Bush administration itself. Go figure.