The Nextpoint Lab blog now at nextpoint.com/blog

Great news! We’ve consolidated our blogs to make it easier for our readers.

You can still keep up to date with vital Nextpoint releases, eDiscovery and litigation best practice tips, and hot industry news at our longstanding Nextpoint blog found at www.nextpoint.com/blog.

We have kept the content here at nextpointlab.com available for everyone, however. It’s just the kind of nice guys we are.

Please update your bookmarks.

Team Nextpoint.

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Adjustable Columns in Gridview

Since the launching of “Gridview”, it has quickly become the most popular format for viewing documents in Trial Cloud and Discover Cloud.  Shortly thereafter, we started offering some customization which also became quite popular and is leveraged in almost every Trial Cloud and Discovery Cloud instance.

Another enhancement has now been introduced, allowing you to view values that are a bit too long for the standard column widths.  Here a portion of the “Author” field is not viewable by default:

Dragging to extend the column, we can now see the full value:

A simple change to make things a bit easier when sorting through the list of values brought back from a search.  Enjoy!

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Custom Label Colors and Document IDs

Sometimes the standard color pallet just doesn’t fulfill your needs. To give you more color choices, we recently added the ability to choose your own label colors in hexadecimal format.

Need help picking a color? There are plenty of sites that offer all the hex color codes. Here’s an example: color-hex.com

Our clients have been telling us how often they’re using the Nextpoint document ID to reference documents in their collections, so we featured them more prominently. You’ve always been able to search for a document by its document ID by using a search like ‘id:123’ and now you can add DocId to your GridviewTemplates.

The document ID is also now more prominently featured on the document detail page.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy these new features.

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Searching for File Extensions

All Nextpoint products now support the ability to search for documents based on file extension via an option available under advanced search.  There you you can enter the extension you wish to search for, such as “pdf” or “docx”.

Alternatively, the standard search box can be used, ie: “file_extension:pdf”.

Searching for “file_extension” is preferred to the use of  other fields such as shortcut, which are subject to wildcard limitations.

We hope this proves a much smoother and more reliable searching experience.

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Mbox Support for Nextpoint’s Trial & Discovery Products

Nextpoint’s Trial Cloud and Discovery Cloud now support the Mbox electronic mailbox format, alongside their longstanding support of Personal Storage Table (PST) archives. Mbox is a common email archive format with a long history of use, uncommon in business environments where Microsoft Outlook is more widespread but supported by most other major email clients, including Thunderbird and Apple Mail. This new feature is transparent to users; simply import an mbox as you would any other container format (such as a PST or a Zip), and Nextpoint will extract and process the contained emails, preparing them for trial or review.

We at the Lab hope this feature will offer a nice alternative to the PST format for users working with email in a wide variety of computing environments.

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Account Dashboard Breakdown

The account dashboard is your tool for keeping up to date on how much data you’re storing in your Trial Cloud, Discovery Cloud and Preservation Cloud repositories.  Each product dashboard provides an overview of the data used by each of your repositories as well as a product-wide gigabyte sum.

The numbers shown for each repository are the averages of all the records for the time period you are viewing. We run our storage calculations twice daily – once in the morning and once in the evening. You can view a repository’s daily usage by clicking on the repository name. The daily usage records shown are the maximum of the two storage numbers for that day in gigabytes.

The Cloud Preservation dashboard includes feed counts as well as storage numbers and presents these in the same fashion.

A note on document deletion: We wait a full day after a document has been deleted to fully purge it from the system. This gives us the ability to restore the document quickly if it was incorrectly deleted. This may cause some lag in the reduction of gigabytes used per day, but have no fear the reduction will be recorded.

Managing storage can be a daunting task and we strive to be transparent about the amount of data you are storing in any of our products.

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DeNIST Document Processing

DeNISTing is the process of filtering documents against a large set of files known to be uninteresting for evidentiary purposes. This set, compiled four times yearly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the National Software Reference Library — more commonly known as the “NIST list” — and it currently contains signatures and metadata for some 69,887,164 common computer files.

Now, documents uploaded to Discovery Cloud and Trial Cloud can be DeNISTed at import. This can be done in one of two ways: tagging or filtering. When configured to tag DeNISTed files, the special “NIST” tag will be applied to all matching files automatically. When configured to filter, those files will be removed completely from imported batches, making it easy to skip past useless files.

On the import page, your current DeNIST setting is now visible.

This setting can be changed in the new DeNIST section of your General Settings page, where there is a full explanation of the feature.

With this feature you can save time and effort skipping right past junk files and straight into more useful, relevant data. We hope you find it helpful.

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Announcing S3 Folders

S3 Folders is an alternative to browser-based data import, allowing you to utilize a variety of  client-based uploading tools to transmit data to Discovery Cloud and Trial Cloud.  File size limitations are effectively removed, allowing you to upload large files (i.e. pst mailboxes) without the hassles associated with splitting them up.

Following upload to Amazon S3, files may be selected for import via the batch creation screen’s file-picker:

Load file formats traditionally supported in browser uploads continue to be supported via both browser upload and Case Folder selection.  Additionally, Case Folders supports the selection of loose files or directories containing loose files, making the upload process that much simpler.  Uploaded directory structures containing load files enjoy the extra benefit of easy correction and drop-in replacement of load files when issues are realized and remedied.

It’s an exciting development that we hope you’ll get a lot of mileage out of.

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Two Factor Authentication

Anytime you log into an account on a website you’re providing proof that you are who you say you are by passing an authentication test.  Most websites rely on only one method to confirm a user’s identity via a username or email address and password.  Websites with a need for stronger security such as banking sites, and now the Nextpoint web applications, require you pass a more rigorous confirmation process.

Two Factor Authentication increases security by using two identification classes to determine that you are who you say you are. The first identification test we use is something you know: your password. We haven’t changed anything about our initial login process, you’ll still need to enter your email or user name and password.

If you pass the first authentication test and we recognize the device you’re connecting with, your login is complete. However, if you pass the first test and you haven’t authorized your computer you’ll be directed to a device verification page.

Here you’ll have to complete our second step in the authentication process. You’ll need to use something you have: access to your email account. When we don’t recognize your device, you are automatically sent an email containing a time sensitive PIN which you’ll use to complete authentication and authorize your device.

The PIN in the email expires shortly after it’s been sent, so make sure you use it in a timely fashion. If you don’t enter the PIN within the time constraints, you can always request a new one from the device verification page.  An added benefit of the automated new device email is that you’ll know right away if your account has been compromised.

If you’re an existing user, we’re providing a quick and easy way to postpone activating this new feature, just click on the ‘postpone until later’ link on the device activation screen and ignore the Device Activation email in your inbox.  You’ll push back activating two factor authentication, and will continue logging in just like you’re used to.  You’ll be presented with the New Device Verification page again in two weeks.  Once you activate one device, two factor authentication will automatically be enabled for your account.  Users created after May 26, 2011 will not be able to defer this feature.

We’re also providing you with a history of your most recent logins, where you’ll be able to see data about your login and which devices you’ve logged in with.

Why are we doing this? We want to make sure that your data is secure even if someone steals your password. Two factor authorization is an extra step for you to log in, but it’s a much bigger obstacle for someone to maliciously access your data.

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CloudPreservation Feed Access

CloudPreservation provides a great way to preserve not only your website, but all of your social media (Twitter, Facebook Pages & Profiles, etc).  But what happens when one person needs access to the NextpointLab Twitter feed, but shouldn’t be able to comb through the Nextpoint Twitter feed?

To that end, we’ve introduced Feed Permissions.

Select the users that should/shouldn’t have access.

Selected users will be able to see the feed in question while others will not*, providing users with the ability to execute a single search across all feeds that they have access to, while limiting the visibility where appropriate.

* Advanced-level users have access to all feeds and cannot be limited.  They are also the only users allowed to manage permission settings.

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