Get Rid of Office 365 eDiscovery Search Limitations Quickly

Ashish Ratan Singh | Modified: December 4, 2018 | Office 365 | 4 Minutes Reading

Trying to export mailbox from O365 to PST format using Office 365 eDiscovery search? But to due to its some limitations, the migration process gets failed. Don’t worry, free try another solution i,e; Office 365 Export Tool to complete the task.

Office 365 is a cloud-based application, which allows the user to access MS Office suite programs along with productivity services on the internet. In fact, O365 users can access their emails or applications from anywhere at any instant of time. Apart from this, What are the Office 365 e-mail search limitations from a discovery perspective? Why do users need to be aware of conducting litigation, internal investigations, and regulatory compliance? Therefore, in the upcoming section, we will discuss Office 365 eDiscovery search limitations in a detailed manner.

Overview of Office 365 eDiscovery Search

The eDiscovery search in Office 365 Compliance Center where cases can be accessed and managed. Now, the user can identify proper email and place a litigation hold on sources like SharePoint and MS Exchange. Holds can be placed depending on the dates, keyword queries, senders, authors, and email domains. When users start searching for keywords, standard Boolean (AND, NOT, OR ) and proximity operators (n) can be used, as well as wildcards expand keywords to contain terms that involve a keyword or terms that have different spellings.

Challenges Faced While Conducting eDiscovery

There are simple email search limitations in MS Office 365 to be aware of conducting eDiscovery. Go through the following points mentioned below:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR): It cannot be performed by Office 365, image-based files cannot be searched (eventually if OCR is added, which is unlikely to be checked with Microsoft Support on OCR engine. Some OCR engines do not support recognition of Japanese, Chinese, and any other foreign languages).
Password Protected Attachments: Unable to search password protect email attachments.
Special Character Indexing: Some special characters like “, . / – ‘ _ &” found in patent cases are not indexed and can get a result in a higher number of documents in attorney review stage of eDiscovery process.

Proportionality

After considering its limitations, should MS Office 365 be used for the eDiscovery search? If so, then to what extent? Being a testifying eDiscovery expert, in any case, some companies have performed electronic discovery using basic features offered by MS Office 365. When the evidence is missed, the consequences will be severe. Please have a look:

Requirement of the case
Determine the amount in controversy
Various Parties of resources
Importance of an issue at stake in action
Importance of discovery in resolving issues

What’s Next?

While performing the Office 365 eDiscovery search process, you must have a higher technical knowledge. Therefore, there is one automated way namely Office 365 Export Tool by which users can migrate Legal hold archive mailboxes or In-place Archive emails. It has the potential to extract Office 365 items including emails, calendars, tasks, contacts, soon. It enables the user to extract only specific data instead of extracting the complete Office 365 mailboxes. Also, it offers date filtration to export O365 data within a certain date range. With this utility, users can extract data from Office 365 account in different file formats without any risk or data loss. Moreover, it has a user-friendly interface that even a novice user can use it without taking external help.

A Step-by-step Procedure to Perform Data Migration

First of all, launch Office 365 Export tool and click on the Login button.
On the next screen, check the checkbox corresponding to Is Admin button.
After that, you can enter all the credentials for same and click on Sign in button.
Under the admin id, all users id will be shown as follows:
Choose the relevant user id credentials as displayed below and press Next button.
Now, select the file type (PST/ EML/ MSG) you want to export emails from Office 365.
Click on Browse button to select the desired location for the software and click the Start. button.
At last, the software will start the export procedure.

Time to Conclude

Office 365 provides a large amount of utility with respect to litigation holds and preservation. However, the email search capabilities have multiple limitations. Thus, in this blog, we have discussed a reliable and instant solution named as Office 365 Export that will help to extract data from Office 365 Mailbox or Archive Mailbox to different file formats. Also, we have explained the complete working steps of the tool in a clear way.