White House Details E-Mail Archiving EffortWhite House Details E-Mail Archiving Effort

In an effort to comply with a lawsuit settlement and to show how the current White House plans to preserve its e-mails the Obama Administration last week released details of its e-mail archiving strategy.

The strategy has provisions for averting the problems that caused the loss of millions of e-mails during the George W. Bush administration.

Details of the plan came in a letter to the two parties in that suit, the National Security Archive and Citizens for Reform and Ethics in Washington. In December, the White House agreed to, among other things, catalog the White House's current e-mail archiving and backup systems, and provide a detailed description of controls that prevent unauthorized deletion of e-mail records.

Those organizations had sued the White House in 2007 after reports that millions of White House e-mail records had gone missing after the Bush Administration abandoned an e-mail records management system that had been installed during the Clinton Administration upon moving from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.

According to the letter, the White House has been using EMC's EmailXtender e-mail management software since Obama's first day in office. The letter says the White House chose EMC's product because of its security, central management, ability to automatically and in near-real time capture messages sent even from Blackberries. It also cited the EMC system's ability to archive messages in their original formats and convert them to another format for transfer to NARA's e-records system, and its ability to provide a searchable online archive and audit reports, among other features.

The White House now fully and automatically backs up its e-mails to a secure off-site data center on the second Tuesday of each month, with incremental backups several times each week and "frequent" tape back-ups. Audits verify that only authorized individuals access the repositories and the EMC system alerts the White House if anyone tries to delete an e-mail without permission, the letter says.

The plaintiffs in the suit applauded the White House's apparent archiving improvements. "The White House appears to be approaching its record preservation obligations with greater conscientiousness than during the last administration," Meredith Fuchs, the National Security Archive's general counsel, said in a statement.

The White House, however, clearly isn't on the present generation of EMC's e-mail management software, as the system evolved last year into a larger content lifecycle management platform known as EMC SourceOne. An IDC white paper from last year notes that EmailXtender was architected in a time when "business requirements and massive information growth were not as critical" as they are today. SourceOne Email Management costs $50,000 for use for 1,000 mailboxes.

The letter represents rare publicity for its author, White House CIO Brook Colangelo, a former tech director for the Democratic National Committee, who has remained in the background as other Obama tech appointees such as federal CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra have taken center stage.

The letter also includes a number of other details about the White House's IT environment, as well. For example, it notes that the White House is in the early stages of an upgrade from Microsoft Exchange 2000 to Microsoft Exchange 2007, which will be completed before the end of the fiscal year this fall, and that White House employees are blocked from accessing "all known Web-based external e-mail systems" and instant messaging programs.

Under the terms of the settlement, the Obama administration will also have to restore Bush-era e-mails from backup tapes, prepare those e-mails for storage by the National Archives and Records Administration and release a set of documents to the lawsuit's plaintiffs.

The suit also uncovered some 22 million e-mails, identified other previously unknown e-mail archives, ensured preservation of e-mails for 12 years after settlement of the suit, and helped encourage improved practices at the White House, according to the National Security Archive.