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."

These days?

[wiredog]

Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying "Never blame on malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."

Six P's

[gregarican]

Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This shouldn't be taken as a Micr$oft bash as much as an example of poor planning. After having administered both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange I can say that ditching Notes for Exchange isn't a bad move. But doing so without planning out the migration path is. Any large scale project should involve a considerable outside contracting firm that would have automated measures in place. You could even plug in a server appliance before your front end Exchange servers that would automatically archive off mail messages being sent to/from the White House staffers. Another example of US government being inept. Just look to how the US air traffic control centers still operate with equipment that is so outdated that some units are out of commission because they can't order vacuum tubes to service them...

Re:The moral of the story

[DavidTC]

the missing e-mails have nothing to do with nefarious scheming

By itself, that might be a sane assumption...but when you consider their other email problem, specifically, that they conducted government business over the RNC's computer to avoid leaving tracks, well, no. It's pretty clearly an obvious plan to avoid any record of what they do.

Criminal?

[Relic of the Future]

So, assuming for a moment their story is true and it *is* just negligence, incompetence, and stupidity; it is still FEDERALLY CRIMINAL negligence, incompetence, and stupidity, Right? Books will be thrown at those responsible, yes?

Re:This is a classic case of...

[Jerf]

So, today the Bush administration is brilliant, and they came up with a genius plan to make email go away, while appearing incompetent.

Someone be sure to send me the talking points when we're back to "The Bush administration is staffed by morons", k?

(Such amazing IQ swings we see. Genius! Moronic! Brilliant! Ape-like! Bing-bam-boom! Sometimes several flip-flops in one day! One would almost wonder if the problem lies in the observers, rather than the observed.)

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." I think "incompetence" covers it just fine; I'm sure this is hardly the first migration screwed up this way.

Lotus Notes is involved here

[wsanders]

My wife works for USDA. On several occasions, she has gone a week or more without email due to botched Lotus Notes upgrades. Mostly, I think it was due to incompetent contractors, but, considering the times I've had a gun put to my head and forced to use Notes (over a slow WAN connection - the very definition of torture) I am sure some of that is intrinsic to the application. I'm not sure what they use now, she does 90% of her email on her blackberry, but I think they have gone to Exchange/Outlook.

Re:This is a classic case of...

[Thing 1]

So, today the Bush administration is brilliant, and they came up with a genius plan to make email go away, while appearing incompetent.

Well, yeah, except: what happened to the final backup tapes of the first installation?

Since it's the last backup of that system it should definitely be marked for retention. And surely, as they realized that they had a retention issue with the new system, they would have ensured to maintain those tapes due to the Presidential Records Act that Bush himself amended?

Also, doesn't it concern anyone that he changed the law regarding what communications can be released and when on Nov 1 2001, [fas.org] just three weeks after 9/11? Coincidence and circumstantial, perhaps, but concerning...

Re:This is a classic case of...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is not. This is a classic case of bullshit. The emails were not lost. They were destroyed. This is a classic case of someone guilty of something coming up with an implausible excuse and when pressed for details, needing to invent an even more implausible scenario to hold their story together.

Think of it as "I do not recall" [k12.va.us] updated for the 21st century.