Gensui Imaging, Episode 5-

Archive Consolidation

A Short Story by Grant Lindsay

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eter Terrell, Gensui Acme Imaging's Vice President of Technology, sat at his desk engrossed in his email. Each morning, like this one, he scanned status updates from direct reports, various system notifications and threaded conversations with various peers and subordinates. His goal was to get a

handle on what needed his immediate attention and what could wait. The months since Gensui Imaging's merger with Acme Co. had been frantic ones for the entire Information Technology department. Combining the computer systems of two different companies was complicated and time-consuming at all levels from senior management down to junior technicians. The only certainty was change. Absorbed in his triage, Peter failed to notice that his Manager of Messaging Systems, Valerie Wright, had appeared at his open office door. She knocked to get his attention. “Have a minute?” Peter looked up from this laptop screen, “If it's good news.” “It's not,” Valerie informed him as she stepped into his office anyway. Peter's shoulders dropped as he sighed. After a pause, he gestured to the chair in front of his desk and Valerie took a seat. Peter braced himself, then asked, “Okay. What is it?” “Ryan lost his laptop,” Valerie said. “Well, had it stolen, apparently?” “Head of accounting, Ryan? Ryan Thurmond?” “Yep. He was on a trip out west and his rental car was broken into. His laptop case was on the passenger seat.” It had taken a moment for Peter to catch up, but now he was wondering why this news was coming from his Messaging Systems Manager. It seemed more of an issue for Desktop Services and, even then, not one that needed a face-to-face conversation. The company had internal systems setup for procurement and even reporting lost and stolen property. “And this is a Messaging issue because...?” “Ryan had local mail archives on his laptop,” Valerie revealed. “The Risk Assessment scan we completed last month shows us what is included in those archives.” Peter processed this. “And now they're gone...,” he started. “And we don't have backups of local files,” Valerie completed the picture for her boss. “The messages in that archive were the only copies.” “What can we do at this point?” Peter asked. “For Ryan's mail, nothing. What's gone is gone.” “I see. Can we do anything going forward?” “From my perspective, since I care most about the messages and being complaint with retention policies, we need to get these archives off all laptops and to a place where we can manage them effectively. And there are other risks besides theft to all this distributed data.” “Such as?” Peter fished.

“P

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“Hard drives crash. Users do stup... I mean, make mistakes. They can delete whole files on their machines thinking they are saving space or they can trash individual messages within the archives. All bad things.” Peter nodded his understanding of the issue. “I assume you have a solution in mind already,” Peter stated. He knew Val's approach. Along with the problem, she always came with a solution or, at least, some suggestions. Valerie smiled. “Sherpa Software has a service that will consolidate distributed archives back to our servers where we can apply retention policies, back up the files and search them when needed. Since we have the results of their Risk Assessment scan, we also know who has these files and their sizes.” “And you have a quote, if I know my Val.” Valerie placed the document on Peter's desk almost before he had finished his sentence. As she left, it occurred to him that Valerie could—and, given her new role, she should—be empowered to make these decisions herself. Yes indeed, nothing was certain but change.

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About the Author

As the Product Manager for Compliance Attender for Notes, Grant is responsible for product research and development, pre-sales technical support (e.g., Demos), post-sales technical support and competitive research. Grant joined Sherpa Software in 2007 and has 17 years of experience in Information Technology. Of those, more than 16 were spent building applications with Lotus Notes and Domino. He worked with a wide range of company sizes and across several industries including insurance, consulting, venture capital, manufacturing, software and more.

Grant is an IBM Certified Advanced Application Developer and an expert in email management and compliance, LotusScript, Notes Formula Language, application design and security. He is also skilled in C/C++ and Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Notes and Domino. Grant is accomplished in web delivered technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. He graduated in 1995 from the Career Development Institute with a Programmer Analyst Diploma. Grant spends his off time with his wife, Lydia, of 19 years and their three retired greyhound racers, Rio, Wavorly and Oriole.