Once you figure out the bolean scripting, it works well. And one of the nice things...though it is a little slow, you can let it zoom along over the network and it never fails. Plus, you can mark which results are really important and which are false positives.
Could be a little zippier, and I've seen a few with better interfaces and search engines, especially considering user files....but I've noticed they are quite a bit more expensive.
I would. It seems to work well and we keep re-upping our support so until something comes out with a bunch of high end features I don't see us moving away from it.
It was purchased for our legal department to use and it took a load of me. I was the person doing all the research at the time. So, it solved 2 problems, I didn't see legal documentation or investigative documents (I'm an it guy) and those documents stayed with the legal department where they should. AND, it freed me up to do other work. For the legal department, they are able to right the boulean scrips and pick what they want to see and cut through it faster than what I was giving them. Purchasing this software has made out time much more efficient.
I like that you can create complex searches and save those searches as templates for future searches. It's an asset for FOIA requests that tend to cover the same ground.
The fact that is can search live data as well as Exchange and users' PST files is a definite checkmark in its favor.
I dislike how long it took to learn the software. While Discovery Attender is thorough and is definitely an asset, the learning curve is fairly steep. Don't expect to jump in and hit the ground running. You will have to dedicate the time to truly learn the ins and outs of this product.
I recommend taking the time to truly familiarize yourself with all the program's capabilities. It can initially seem overwhelming, but through training and utilizing customer support, you can become proficient.
We primarily use it to fulfill litigation and FOIA requests. The benefits we have realized include being able to create and save templates for common searches/requests. This saves us time and money in the overall scheme of our daily business requests and tasks.
Detailed criteria allow you to drill down and get very specific about what you are looking for.
Reviewing search results within the tool is fairly clunky. You are better off exporting the results and reviewing them in another tool. There is no ability to search across the enterprise; you have to specify which mailboxes to search.
Be aware that collection from O365 mailboxes will be SLOW. This is not a limitation of the tool, just a product of the architecture that forces all email to be pulled from the cloud before it can be searched. Would love to see Microsoft open the cloud search API so other tools could run searches in O365 before pulling results down.
The need to collect email in native form for Legal and Compliance review.
Discovery Attender is extremely flexible, and has uses outside ediscovery, as well. It has the best-designed search builder I have come across in ten years of work in this field.
The reporting could be improved, and I would love to see DA extract more metadata for us.
This is the Swiss Army knife of ediscovery tools.
We use Discovery Attender for initial searching of PSTs and Lotus databases, as well as files. It has proved useful in searching beyond ediscovery needs, as well.
Intuitive yet very powerful, allows use of regular expressions, caches results so I can check results well after the original search without hunting down the original PST files, ability to schedule searches
I wouldn't say there's anything I dislike about this product.
I use this to search saved PST files, and do not connect directly to mailboxes. I find it much better and more reliable to perform the searches against a controlled environment, even though it does sometimes add an extra step.
Producing e-mail search results for public records requests and other investigations.
Discovery Attender will convert just about any email archive or message. I have used it to covert NSF, PST, MSG's or EMLs. I have never had a problem.
The only thing I don't like about the product is keeping a history of global de-duplication. If have to keep processing the Master email set to continue de-duping on a global level.
Our current ESI processing tool does not allow users to process email archives. Therefore we use Discovery Attender to do the job.