Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We now know how the Whitehouse managed to lose about five million emails. It seems that they 'upgraded' their Lotus Notes system, which had an automatic retention and backup system, for Microsoft Exchange, which did not support the automatic system. So they changed it to a manual process, where aides would manually sort emails one by one into individual PST files, which they call a 'journaling' archive system. They're still building a replacement for the retention system. Right when they had one finished, the White House CIO complained that it made Microsoft Exchange too slow, so they hired yet another contractor to build another one, causing a senior IT official to quit in protest. So they still haven't completed the project after almost eight years, and rely on humans to sort millions of emails."

Comments

So to summarize

[roystgnr]

The White House's failure to follow records retention laws was due to deficiencies in Microsoft software?

I predict this will lead to a civil, thoughtful Slashdot discussion which results in many useful recommendations for avoiding similar problems in the future.

I recommend fire.

Re:This is a classic case of...

[PawNtheSandman]

"Mission Accomplished"

Re:so to summarize...

[ColdWetDog]

Basically this comes down to either:

The Government was Incompetent.
or ...
The Government is lying and covering up.

I understand the concept of Occam's Razor, but it could really be a case of AND instead of OR.

It fits the results better, actually.

Re:Am I the only one that

[ArcherB]

I imagine it sucks worse than what Clinton had them do. I don't know if sucks worse is the right phrase to use here.

Re:Seems like a market for e-mail archiving...

[caluml]

Too bad that you're grammer sucks, you meant?