Earlier this month, Apple released the iPad to the general public.  There has been considerable discussion as to whether a device such as the iPad, with functionality between a smart phone and a laptop, will appeal to users.  In the last month, I’ve certainly seen a number of emails with a “Sent from my iPad” signature line.   As such, devices such as the iPad are worth evaluating and discussing from a discovery perspective.

The idea of a device that allows remote access and offline functionality is certainly not new – the laptop has been around for many years and smart phones have been growing in popularity for some time now.  The challenge with all of these mobile devices, from a discovery perspective, lies in how to manage their content.  Laptops, which store very large volumes of data, have become commonplace for collection of ESI.  Some companies have configured their employee laptops to replicate the most common ESI (email, My Documents) to a centralized server on a frequent and regular basis.  This configuration, which leaves as little unique information on the laptop as possible, can alleviate some of the costs and challenges associated with data collection for remote employees.  The common ESI content on a smart phone is typically managed either through a tethered connection to a desktop or laptop computer or wirelessly to a centralized server. 

The iPad needs to be connected to a computer that is running iTunes, to be activated, but once activated it can store many gigabytes of iWork documents (word processing documents using Pages, spreadsheets and graphs using Numbers, and presentations using Keynote).  Without proper configuration and content management, the iPad could easily become a unique source of potentially relevant ESI.

We are a mobile society, and more business is performed “on the go” each day.  The iPad is not going to be the last mobile technology that we will ever want or need – in fact, I can imagine that someday there will be a device with functionality between a smart phone and an iPad.  From a preservation and collection perspective, these technologies are best configured if they are set up to be a secondary device with as little unique ESI as possible. 

In my next blog post, I will write about the ways one can alleviate some of the cost and complexity associated with preserving and collecting ESI from many different remote access devices for each custodian.

About Juilan Ackert

More ...