Silverpop, a premier email service provider, supports the online relationship marketing needs of enterprise organizations by delivering the world's most comprehensive array of on-demand Web-based software solutions.  Its software-as-a-service approach makes it easy and affordable for marketers to create, automate and execute lifecycle multi-channel marketing campaigns that are timely, relevant and measurable.  Silverpop’s customers include British Sky Broadcasting, Fossil, Houghton Mifflin, Little Tikes and Siemens.

How to Reduce Data Center Energy Costs without Compromising Application Performance

By Gary Watson

By Geoff Stedman

Your CEO is appearing before the entire company. This is the annual go-get-‘em vision speech that inevitably follows a positive-or-negative-you-choose-the-one-that-applies annual financial report.  This time it’s different and you suspect that something has been added to the water. The message this time is one of embracing chaos. “Chaos,â€� the president extols “is just the thing to improve innovation and creativity.â€� Clearly, this year’s speech preparation was done from the business bargain bin of the local second-hand bookstore, where ten-year-old books espousing chaos as the next insanely great thing in corporate management strategy languish alongside those Magic Eye 3D books you never could get to work. And just when you think this is just another touchy-feely talk designed to induce goose bumps in marketing and naps in IT, the bomb is dropped. “…and we’re starting with the storage infrastructure!â€�

The tiniest bead of sweat begins moving down your forehead and manages to avoid all eyebrow obstacles to find its way directly into the corner of your eye. At the same moment, all of the floor tiles except the one you’re standing on fall away, the walls turn inside out to reveal an endless flaming landscape, and your mind screams that this can only be one place. That’s when you wake up to find the electric blanket was turned up too high and it was all a horrible nightmare. But storage chaos is closer than you might think and how you cope could make the difference between a dream and a nightmare.

Mark Twain Junior/Senior High School, located in the heart of San Diego, is a special counseling-oriented school in which the personal, social, academic and career requirements of students are addressed within a warm, friendly and helpful atmosphere.  With approximately 300 students at its main campus and 200 additional students at two satellite locations, the school is small by most San Diego standards.  Its size, however, gives administrators the ability to stay closely in tune with each student’s unique needs and to remain ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting new teaching methods.

To wrap up this month’s coverage on e-discovery and archiving, we are including an e-discovery product roundup of various solutions on the market to help IT with the process. The roundup includes complete data discovery solutions, email archiving, time and date stamping, and log management.

Thank you to all our contributors who provided input to this month's focus.

- Computer Technology Review Editorial Staff

By Bobby Balachandran

Recent litigation heavily sanctioning attorneys for discovery violations is a key motivation driving the legal community to evaluate legal hold solutions in 2008.

Today, lawyers must proactively identify a client’s case management and discovery failures as well as create a roadmap for discovery obligations. This theory, however, doesn’t take into account the entire management of the discovery process. Any revised protocols will fail without being fully integrated into business processes. It is too late for imprecise outlines in this heightened era of accountability. Instead, lawyers need a global positioning system for document management beginning with an automated legal hold strategy.

By Patrick Taylor

For more than five years, companies have struggled to meet the requirements imposed on them by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Under this legislation, documenting and testing financial controls requires an almost Herculean effort. Companies find themselves feeding countless man hours and vast resources into meeting these requirements with little noticeable positive outcome.

While SOX was necessary, especially in the face of some of the significant scandals such as Enron or WorldCom, the mounting strain caused other difficulties. The cost for this compliance was borne across all publicly traded companies and with it the subsequent exhaustive bureaucracy of control activities and documentation. While the legislation did not intend to create such arduous regulations, that nonetheless occurred.

By Tom Klaff

An Authentic Challenge

In the last decade, electronic records have taken over the business world. Just as e-mail has become the preferred method of business communication for nearly everyone, financial records, legal documents and work assignments are now kept primarily—and sometimes solely—in electronic form. Electronic records and e-mails are widely accepted for many important business communications that previously required physical signatures or paper documentation and the proliferation of electronic records in the business world is reflected in recent statistics on e-mail usage. According to research from the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems, more than 93 percent of all corporate data is created electronically and e-mail is accepted as written confirmation of approvals or orders in nearly 80 percent of organizations.