Data integration platform Onna has unveiled key enhancements to its Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Exchange connectors, increasing customers’ ability to discover and collect Microsoft data for litigation and investigations.
Onna’s connectors provide API-based integrations with the most popular collaboration and productivity tools, extracting, then processing and indexing all available data and metadata to give organizations one view of their corporate knowledge.
Onna, which counts NewsCorp, Dropbox and Fitbit among its customers, says customers can now extend collections across the entire scope of Microsoft Teams instant messaging, including one-to-one chats, group chats and channel messages, along with any shared attachments, reactions and emojis. This also includes collecting messages from custodians even if they are inactive participants within a Teams chat or channel.
While law firms are still in their relative infancy in using Teams, the corporate world has been much quicker in its adoption of the enterprise collaboration platform.
“The use of Microsoft Teams skyrocketed in 2020, and, as remote and hybrid working have become permanent fixtures of our world today, its popularity isn’t slowing down,” said Salim Elkhou, founder and CEO at Onna. “Businesses must think about what this means for their information governance obligations, particularly for legal teams who must be able to easily discover and collect Microsoft data for litigation and investigations, and for the IT teams tasked with supporting these requests.”
Collaboration data, including from Microsoft Teams, is increasingly becoming a standard request for submission during the eDiscovery process. Some eDiscovery capabilities are built into E3 and E5 licenses for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 but they primarily only capture Microsoft data, which doesn’t support the nearly 80 percent of businesses who are supplementing their Microsoft solutions with additional best-of-breed apps like Zoom and Slack.
Elkhou added: “With connectors for the most popular workplace applications, Onna is ideally placed to defensibly capture the totality of data that modern businesses generate, beyond Microsoft alone. Bringing these data sources together within a single, self-service platform that is powerful yet simple to use empowers legal specialists to take a more proactive approach to eDiscovery, while minimizing support requests for IT teams.”
Caroline.hill@legalitlexicon.com