E-Discovery Center in SharePoint 2013

Introduction

This article explains exporting the search results using eDiscovery.

SharePoint 2013 will have a new feature that should make it easier to search across multiple SharePoints to find documents, websites and email messages spread across laptops, email servers, file servers and other sources and collect and act on the content that meets the criteria for legal cases.

The SharePoint 2013 and the 2013 suite of products from Microsoft, eDiscovery cannot only search for data within SharePoint, but it can also search and identify data within Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013.

In this article we will see:

  • Configuring an eDiscovery center
  • Creating an eDiscovery case (set)
  • Creating an in-place hold on the documents/content in the eDiscovery case
  • Exporting the content in the eDiscovery case. (Export the search results using eDiscovery.)

The following are the key components of eDiscovery:

  1. The eDiscovery Center: This is a central SharePoint site used to manage preservation, search and export of content stored in Exchange and SharePoint across SharePoint Farms and Exchange servers.
  2. SharePoint In-Place Hold: Preserves entire SharePoint sites and protects all the documents, pages and list items within the site but allows users to continue to edit and delete preserved content.
  3. Exchange In-Place Hold: Preserves the Exchange mailboxes and protects all mailbox content using the same UI and APIs used to preserve SharePoint sites.
  4. Query-based Preservation: Allows users to apply query filters to one or more Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint sites and restrict the content that is held. We can pass an empty query also if you don't want to restrict the content.

This article explains configuring the eDiscovery center and exports the search results in the SharePoint 2013 Preview.

Step 1

Create a new site collection. Then give the site a name and selecte “Discovery Center” as the template from within the Enterprise templates group.



Once you have saved this, the eDiscovery site collection will be created and it will look like this:



Select Create new Case to test this new feature and it will redirect to the new site creation page.



Enter the SharePoint site and save this one, it will redirect to the new eDiscovery page.



We have created a eDiscovery case and created a new Discovery Set.

Clicking on the new item link takes us to this screen and selects the source (Add and manage source) link.



I added a site created for eDiscovery https://thegowtham.sharepoint.com/sites/ed/edtest1 because in this Document Library I have added a few test documents uploaded. Here we will ignore the filter and just select the option to create an In-Place Record Hold and save it.





And I have added sample documents to this site Document Library as in the following:



Search and Export in eDiscovery results: SharePoint 2013

Once an eDiscovery set has been created the next step is to query the case.We see an option to create a query that will filter data from the document set with a hold placed on it.

Clicking the “new item” link takes us to a screen to create a new query.



Click the search button then you can see the preview results, Exchange and SharePoint.



On the right side, we see the “Export Status” section that provides a summary view of the “Search and Export” section.

Click the Export button to take us to the following screen:



Click the OK button to bring us to yet another screen with the following option.

The Download Report

This button will provide reports about exported search results content.

  • These reports can identify
  • SharePoint or Exchange content
  • Content location
  • Content errors associated with it such as content not exported due to search indexing issues.

The Download Results. This button will export the content in the query to your computer and the following screen will explain this. Click the Download results.







Output







I hope this article is helpful for everyone. Thanks for your learning.