In honor of our latest major release to Donoma StoneScribe: commentary on Adam Famularo’s recent Forbes article: The Evolution of Data Governance  that looks ahead to the real value of communications data governance.

Data Retention Needs to Evolve.

From its origins in bulky databases sequestered by IT; data retention is poised to become more than a safety net. Its time has come as a means to deliver innovation, along with security and compliance. Retained data is valuable. It can drive insight and collaboration. Create engagement across organizations. A better use of resources than continuing to manage silos of data retained in the hopes of never seeing it again.

More Than Compliance

As Famularo states, “…data governance is no longer optional because it underpins data security, compliance and privacy. While regulatory compliance and risk mitigation are key drivers, the reality is that data governance is a strategic component of an organization’s digital and business transformation journey.”

Yes, litigation and regulations have been the stick; but insight and innovation are today’s powerful carrots. Until now, preservation of electronic communications was driven by a culture of fear, not of innovation. Data was banished into cumbersome retention systems that have more in common with the Eagles’ Hotel California. Data checks in, but rarely does anyone want to see it again.

The Time is Now

Yes, I have a dog in this hunt. Seven years ago, Donoma Software released StoneScribe, a very agile, secure retention product for Cisco Jabber XMPP data. We saw a need not to just fill a niche gap, but to build a more agile retention product. One that could be both secure and easy to use, by people outside of IT. We saw the opportunity to make the data more useful throughout an organization. So, we focused. Refined our architecture. Listened to the challenges of our clients. Embraced cloud and host of new security needs. Then take that capability and go bigger.

Innovate: with a Link to Legacy

With our newest release, we are opening up our communications retention platform to deliver on this vision. We are embracing communication streams beyond Cisco, and soon, beyond XMPP data. All while making it easy to integrate with legacy data repositories.

In the end, the article sums the opportunity of this new engagement model of data best:

“…an organization’s success is not measured by how much data it gathers; rather, it depends on how well it uses it. By embracing data governance as part of the culture, data intelligence can help you ensure that your company’s data is actively being put to good use.”

We could not agree more.

StoneScribe’s Spring 19 Release Heralds Big Changes

Seven years ago, Donoma Software released our first version of StoneScribe to address the very real gap we saw in the market for secure retention of Cisco Jabber XMPP data. Based on our prior experience building solutions to retain voicemail data, we saw a need not to just fill a niche gap, but to build a more agile retention platform. One that could be both secure and easy to use, by people outside of IT. We saw the opportunity to make the data more useful throughout an organization. So, we focused. Refined our architecture. Listened to the challenges of our clients. Embraced cloud and host of new security needs.

With our latest release, we take all that we have learned and we’re ready to deliver what the market has asked for:  StoneScribe’s ability, security and agility with more integration.

Innovation: with a Link to Legacy

With this newest release, we are opening up StoneScribe to deliver on this vision. We are embracing communication streams beyond Cisco Jabber. All while making it easy to integrate with legacy data repositories.

Want to learn more?  Join us Thursday, May 9th at 2 PM Eastern when we’ll discuss what makes this release so powerful and where we plan to go from here.

Learn more: Beyond Compliance: The Dawn of Agile Data Retention

Why is this a big deal? Greater manageability from one administration console and the ability to aggregate licenses for greater discounts.

Now with the capability of Multi-Domain Support, organizations running Unify for Gmail have the ability to distribute the product across all domains associated on a G-Suite account.

Beena Jacob, Director, Product Development

Donoma is always striving to improve the customer experience, whether it’s innovative features; or processes that makes our software robust and scalable. This technical series is designed to shed light on how our team is looking ahead and planning for new functionality, more security, more agility, even how Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be woven into our solutions. Our first discussion will be focused on providing context and background on cloud native, as well as how we’ve already begun to implement its principals into our solutions. Let’s dive in!

Exactly What is Cloud Native?

Cloud native is currently one of the leading trends in the computer industry. As the ecosystem around cloud-native technologies grows, it will become the competitive differentiator that will keep your company relevant in the future.

Cloud native is about innovating rapidly, improving scalability, and reducing operation costs, all while managing risks at a smaller scale. Let’s explore each one of these cloud-native fundamentals.

Innovating rapidly:In the past, the norm was to avoid risk and move slowly and carefully. How about releasing ideas to production within days or even within hours? Cloud native approach helps you get your ideas to the market fast by doing small incremental steps so that it can be reversible if needed. Risks become more manageable while accelerating change.

Improving Scalability:When ideas are released to market faster and as your business grows, you will need to support more users, locations, devices and scalability becomes critical.

Reducing operation costs:When business grows, you’ll need to plan your infrastructure needs and operation costs. With platform-as-a-service you can provision and pay for only what is needed.

So, whether a business is an enterprise or a startup, cloud native is applicable for both. Its strategy is all about reducing technical risks while innovating rapidly. Cloud native can be extremely powerful, but it does involve considerable amount of technical challenges and a cultural shift in your business.

How Does Cloud Native Work?

Cloud Native Can Look Like Many Things!

Like the story of the blind men and an elephant, cloud native might seem like it has different meanings, but this is not the case. The core components that make up cloud native each play a vital role in the implementation of cloud-native applications. Let’s dive briefly into each one:

Microservices:Microservices, also known as microservices architecture, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are loosely coupled, independently deployable, and organized around business domains.

Containers: Containers make it easy to test processes and dependencies, as well as move and deploy.

Orchestration Tools:Orchestration helps with tasks such as scaling, configuration, rolling updates, etc.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service:Services can run on servers that can be provisioned on demand.

Continuous delivery:With automated testing and container packages, deployment to production is continuous.

How We’ve Already Begun Our Journey to Cloud Native

At Donoma, we’ve already begun our journey to cloud native, and are approaching it full-speed ahead. What do we mean by this? We’ve already taken the initiative to implement cloud-native principals into our solutions. We’ll use our product, OneView, as an example. OneView was created to provide insight and analytics for unified communication systems. When we developed the solution a few years back, we had developed it strictly for on-premise installations. Since then we have transitioned from on-premise, to SaaS (cloud enabled), and now to cloud native.

Microservices architecture plays an important role in developing cloud-native applications. For example, our latest OneView release included animated display of call routing within a unified communication system. Implementing this feature involved quite a few moving parts and complex call routing logic. By implementing modules as loosely coupled microservices, we were able to manage the technical risks and complete the feature within the aggressive timeline.

Time for You to Begin Your Journey

As we come to a close in our first discussion, we hope by providing you background and context to cloud native, as well as detailing the ways in which we’ve already embarked on our journey, you’ll be encouraged to now begin your journey. If you are to go ahead and embark on it, it’s important you understand that designing cloud-native applications doesn’t happen overnight. It is rather a journey that requires thoughtful planning and organizational support. There are no hard or fast rules, but it is best to start small.

Don’t go anywhere as we still have a lot to unpack in this Strategy & Design Series. Earlier, we briefly defined the core components that make up cloud native, as well as the role microservices played in the implementation of our latest OneView feature. So, in our next discussion, we’ll be digging even deeper into these core components, starting with microservices. See you next time!

Donoma Unify for Gmail’s latest 8.7.5 release brings productivity enhancements for both end-users and IT administrators.

End-users now have additional response options: Click to Call links within the message makes it easy to launch a return call from within the email; and replying directly back to the message sender within the email client is even easier.

IT Administrators will enjoy the support for Active Directory to bring in and auto-link users, and the web-based Administration portal has been upgraded to offer latest security protocols and browser support options.

Clients can schedule their update by contacting support@donomasoftware.com and our team will schedule a time with you.

Donoma Software is looking forward to one of our most anticipated events of the year: The Cisco Collaboration VT happening this week at Cisco’s campus in San Jose, CA.

Once again, we will be a Sponsoring Partner for this invitation-only technical conference.  It’s where Cisco’s elite Collaboration experts come together to get trained on Cisco’s latest releases, while gaining insight into future product direction, and networking with peers and solution developers from around the world.

Cindy DeHart and Parker Pearson will be on site for our team: available in the Event Hub, and during the Tuesday evening reception.  We encourage you to stop by and learn how Donoma’s suite of solutions are helping organizations to:

• Satisfy Regulatory Compliance & Mitigating Risk
• Provide Visibility Into Customer & Employee Interactions
• Ensure Optimal Voice Network Resources & Performance
• Easily Identifying Optimal Staffing, Workloads & Performance Delivery
• Deliver Real-Time Visibility & Customizable Reporting
• Support Mobility & Productivity for the Gmail & Lotus Notes Environments

Be sure to stop by and see them – or connect on Twitter @donomasoftware to find a time to catch up in person!

See you in San Jose!

This morning, LegalTech News ran a timely story on the case between Central European News and Buzzfeed over allegations of fake news. (Leidig v. Buzzfeed) Fake news is news these days, but what got our attention was discussion of the shifts from the court in the willingness to tolerate improper records retention, that resulted in spoliation, incomplete production, and the assertions from the bench that attempting to hide (or distract) the ball when it comes to E-Discovery is an outmoded strategy that needs to end.

In particular, we noted a couple of key points in the article that surface in some of our technical conversations about our retention solutions.

1. No special effort was made to preserve document concerning the Buzzfeed piece. ”Plaintiff “was instructed by counsel to preserve evidence only evidence only after the lawsuit was filed.”

With the increased ease of communications retention, the argument that it is too expensive or not a high enough priority is one we commonly see. The Information Security and Compliance staff often are proactive in trying to address retention but are often shut down by others in the organization who do not yet see the need. Often the conversation changes radically once a team has had to go through a production effort, at which point data may no longer even exist. Most organizations can expect legal action as a course of business. Judges are signaling that a lack of retention is not an acceptable practice.

2. Metadata was inadvertently modified and deleted when the plaintiff attempted to manually move files to a production repository.

What happened here was spoliation: data was moved from one location to another in such a way that the metadata was modified or even removed. Here’s a real-world impact of what can happen when a technical decision to treat data in a more casual unstructured manner has repercussions to the bottom line. Often people look at our retention solutions; and then try to go and make low cost workarounds that involve pushing or copying data from one system to another without understanding the impact to not only the record, but the impact when challenged in court. We see it time and again, and we’ve yet to see a long term successful outcome when attempting to short-cut proper retention protocols.

However, technology is just part of the issue. In a recent judges’ report cited in this article, “30 active federal judges said the problem with e-discovery for most attorneys isn’t process or technology, it’s an overly adversarial mindset. When asked how attorneys could best improve e-discovery practices, the No. 1 response given was “cooperating with opposing counsel.”

Legal counsel likely fears what exists in their data, or the effort to review and produce. In reality, proactive retention with technology like our Communications Archiving Suite can help organizations respond faster at lower cost because data can be found, and put into context while maintaining good records retention hygiene.

We agree. ” It’s not personal, it’s E-Discovery.”

We’re blushing.  Just a bit.

It’s Valentine’s Day and what better day to give a gift?  Today we introduce a new feature for our OneView CDR & Analytics solution for Cisco:  Trunk Line Utilization Reporting.

For all of you who have always wanted to know how your phone system’s utilization of lines matches up with your telco line expenditures, OneView’s latest new feature is a feature you will fall in love with.  Now you can easily see peak utilization times, details and durations – matched up against your line provisioning.  Now you can be sure your phone lines are optimized based on real time data right at your fingertips.

Want to learn more?  Give us a call, or talk to your Cisco integrator.  We’ll be happy to show you how OneView making communications analytics useful with data-driven insight for better decisions and  better organizational performance.

>REQUEST DEMO/DISCUSSION

> REQUEST PRICING

Retention & management of voicemails is an increasingly common conversation within even un-regulated organizations.  Ever since unified messaging made it possible to email a voicemail; managing voicemails has become a challenge.

Have you been searching for a solution to make it easy to gain insight into your organization’s use of your Cisco phone system? Whether you are:

• a phone system engineer needing to quickly pin point call problems,
• an executive seeking to assess call volumes in and out of various departments, or
• an accountant looking to track calling accounting data,

Donoma OneView makes it easy to gain insight into your Cisco phone system.  Call Detail analytics helps to resolve problems faster, improve service levels, and leverage insight for operational improvement.

OneView offers the ease of use and role-based access control that we’ve become known for with our Compliance & Archiving solutions.  With just a few clicks you can find the data you need, even create a graphical report for one time use or scheduled updates.

• Graphical system performance dashboards.
• Flexible reports that span multiple data views. (Quality, Detail, Accounting)
• Customized system performance alerts & metrics.
• Lightning fast searches.
• Call data that can span from summary to technically detailed.

For pricing, demonstration, or a free 30 day trial, contact us or your local Cisco integration partner today!

>>Register for our OneView features overview webinar on June 23:

Session 1: 10 AM (Eastern US timezone)

Session 2: 2 PM (Eastern US timezone)