What if enterprises could do away with Microsoft exchange servers?
Maybe they can now, and without switching to Lotus Notes. Bringing Outlook and Gmail Closer Together (NY Times blog and in print on 31 March 2008) describes a product by Cemaphore Systems called MailShadow for Google Apps. It
“allows people to automatically synchronize their e-mail, calendar and address books between Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail… it represents an interesting use of the Google computing “cloud”… [it] would allow businesses to rip out their Exchange servers and run Outlook, which millions of users are familiar with, directly from the Google servers.”
This technology has potential as both a back-up service for law firm e-mail, if not as a way to eliminate Exchange servers. I’ve previously written about Google’s Cloud Computing; this is an application / service that rides on top of it.
I’m not techie enough to venture a guess on the potential e-discovery implications of moving to this architecture. At minimum, it would be one more data source to harvest.