Mimosa Systems, a provider of next-generation email, file and SharePoint archiving solutions, today announced Mimosa NearPoint™ 4.0, the fourth major version of its comprehensive solution for archiving, eDiscovery and business user productivity. Including new capabilities for expedited eDiscovery in very large enterprise deployments and support for multiple data capture methods, NearPoint 4.0 also offers significant new functionality for today’s information worker that unifies information from all content types into a powerful personal productivity and business decision platform powered by an intelligent archive.

“An organization’s information archive is the living, breathing record of its business,” said Laura DuBois, IDC. “If properly implemented and managed with the right solutions and processes, the enterprise archive can become the pivotal business productivity and decision platform for optimizing a business’ intellectual capital for informed business analytics. Customers should definitely evaluate Mimosa NearPoint 4.0 which delivers significant new capabilities for eDiscovery and enterprise business productivity– all key components of tomorrow’s intelligent enterprise archiving platform.”

Expedited Electronic Discovery
Mimosa NearPoint 4.0 decreases the time to identify, collect and preserve electronically stored information with advanced case management and workflow tools that leverages attorney work products between cases. As a result, Legal and Compliance teams can work together efficiently to assess the case, determine legal strategies, place item-level litigation holds, and complete pre-reviews or internal audits quickly.

“The downturn in the economy has increased litigation, particularly around employment and shareholder issues.  Companies are well advised to consider a proactive plan for dealing with litigation before it ensues.  Business should strive to avoid liability where possible and mitigate costs when litigation is necessary.  Because of the amorphous nature of Electronically Stored Information (ESI), eDiscovery often drives litigation costs.  Compliance with eDiscovery requirements very often means ensuring complete ESI data capture to a searchable ESI archive,” said William Savarino, Partner in the Washington DC Law Firm of Cohen Mohr LLP. “Bringing the eDiscovery process in-house through the use of case management and delegated administration tools like those offered by Mimosa NearPoint eDiscovery allows corporate legal departments to save cost and time.”

Key eDiscovery features of NearPoint 4.0 include:

• Unified eDiscovery across email, file system, and SharePoint content.
• Workflow tools to organize and share complex search queries, review list, legal holds and tags across cases or teams.
• Delegate sensitive workloads such as search and pre-review from IT to legal teams.
• Search automation and federation across geographies and domains with granular permissions.
• Scheduled searches to automatically populate a case with new content received into the archive.

“We need to continue to expedite our eDiscovery practices while ensuring complete content capture to our archive,” said Michael Lawrence, CISO & Senior Network Administrator, City of Lenexa. “Mimosa NearPoint supports our need to perform individual item-level legal holds and conversation and proximity analysis. NearPoint’s case management and delegated administration will allow users to run their own searches and escalate sensitive content to Legal for review. We have been a long time Mimosa user and the product continues to be on the cutting-edge. It’s the most powerful solution we have found for archiving and enterprise eDiscovery.”

Advanced Information Access for Today’s Enterprise Information Worker
To take the value of archived data a step further, Mimosa NearPoint 4.0 adds unified and offline information access to email and file system content allowing information workers to search or browse their archives, find their relevant content, and get on with the task at hand. New NearPoint 4.0 Information Access features include:

• Unified access to email and file system content that is presented in a familiar Outlook, Outlook Web Access (OWA) or browser user interface.
• Advanced offline access to archived content through a secure cache.
• Windows Desktop Search (WDS) integration presents active and archived content in a single view.
• Highlighting of query terms in the search results.

Multiple Capture Methods
Mimosa NearPoint 4.0 now provides a generalized framework for multiple capture methods from a variety of data sources. The framework is designed to support server, device and network methods for capture of on-premise and hosted email. In addition to its unique Continuous Application Shadowing™ based on Microsoft’s Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), Mimosa NearPoint 4.0 adds a broad set of additional capture methods for Microsoft Exchange. Designed to support a wide range of customer configurations, NearPoint 4.0 enables the richness and flexibility of multiple capture mechanisms so organizations can best leverage their infrastructure. NearPoint 4.0’s new multiple capture methods include:

• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) based Continuous Application Shadowing™ which speeds the log application process by an order of magnitude.
• Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) option combined with Exchange Journaling. Customers can choose this configuration as an alternative to Continuous Application Shadowing™. Exchange 2007 Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) passive node capture which enables organizations to use third-party software for shadowless archives.
• Extensible framework to add new capture methods in the future using device snapshots, backup copies, Exchange Web Services (EWS) or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

Extended Features for the Large Enterprise
Mimosa NearPoint 4.0 features a host of new features developed for large enterprise deployments that significantly reduce overall storage requirements including compression, delta storage for distribution list changes, compaction of message headers, and enhanced support for de-duplication devices such as those from Data Domain. NearPoint 4.0 is also certified for use with VMware and Hyper-V for integration into virtual datacenter infrastructures. For large organizations that want to migrate away from legacy archive products into a next-generation archive, or integrate upstream eDiscovery or records management applications with a enterprise archive, NearPoint 4.0 also features an enhanced software development toolkit (SDK) as part of the Open Mimosa Developer Program. Vendors such as Procedo and TransVault have partnered with Mimosa to build migration tools to accelerate migrations from first generation archives. Other eDiscovery and records management vendors including Oracle, PSS, and Kazeon are leveraging the SDK to apply record management policies and legal holds in place, without the need to move or copy the original content.

About Mimosa NearPoint
Mimosa NearPoint addresses critical customer requirements around archiving, eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, business continuity, and storage optimization in a unified solution. Mimosa NearPoint proactively captures email, files, SharePoint content and instant messages; and provides legal search workflow, case management, employee supervision, immediate high fidelity coarse and fine grain recovery, disaster recovery, and self-service search and access in one solution. By leveraging cost-effective storage and advanced classification rules, NearPoint also optimizes content storage and reduces overall infrastructure costs.