The document is a short story about an email journal encryption issue encountered during a company merger. It is told over 4 parts: 1) The story introduces Alex at a merger celebration who is worried about her new role. An IT issue is discovered where encrypted email journals cannot be automatically searched. 2) Valerie struggles to manually search hundreds of journals to aid legal proceedings. 3) Peter seeks a solution and learns Sherpa Software can help with journal decryption. Valerie gets help completing the project. 4) At lunch, the characters reflect on resolving the issue with Sherpa's assistance.

1. Gensui Imaging -
Encrypted Journal Fiasco
A Short Story by Grant Lindsay
Under the copyright laws, neither the documentation nor the software can be copied, photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to
any electronic medium of machine-readable form, in whole or in part, without the written consent of Sherpa Software Partners, except in
the manner described in the software agreement.
© Copyright 2011 Everest Software, L.P., d.b.a. Sherpa Software Partners, L.P.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States.
Compliance Attender for Lotus Notes is the registered trademark of Sherpa Software Partners, L.P.

2. ------------------------------------------------------- Part 1 -------------------------------------------------------
“I
t had been a mild December in Pittsburgh so far. There had not been any snow, but today it was
cold and overcast. Now, as Alexandra Jennings looked out the seventeenth floor window of the
William Penn Hotel, she saw that the promised scattered showers had decided to settle in like an
unwelcome relative. She took a small sip of her Chardonnay as she turned her attention back to the growing din
in the Grand Ballroom as people continued to arrive.
This was the “Big Event,” a joint, formal, two-location, public announcement and celebration of the Gensui-Acme
merger. There were still all the legal hoops to jump through, which meant things were in flux and there was more
than a little uncertainty. Alex had never liked uncertainty.
She scanned the room from her perch by the window, as if she was watching the event on a screen, an observer
not a participant. Alex saw Derek Reinholt, current head of Gensui Imaging, moving through the room with
Roberta Newell, his counterpart at Acme Co., shaking hands and making introductions.
Several hundred Gensui employees were going to be here. There was also a two-way video conference tie-in
with a hotel in Anaheim, California, where Acme Co. had its offices. The several screens around the room
showed a live feed of a similar ballroom with a growing crowd of Acme Co. employees milling around and
chatting before the presentations and speeches. The scenes on the screens added to Alex's feeling of
detachment.
Other Acme Co. executives were present at the Pittsburgh event, as well. Among them, Marc Fuentes, currently
Acme Co.'s Chief Operations Officer and likely to become Alex's new boss. She had met him by phone and liked
him well enough, but she was not inclined to meet him in person, although she knew she should. The details of
the new company structure had not been finalized, yet. Still, if things continued as they appeared to be going,
she would no longer be reporting to the head of the company.
She told herself that mergers always shake things up, but this impending change felt like a demotion. It felt like
retribution for her slip-up a few weeks back when Derek had first disclosed the merger and Alex had
thoughtlessly sent an email about it to her husband. It had all been blown out of proportion, she felt. Especially,
since the emails were stopped by some email filtering software. In actuality, nothing had happened. There was
no harm done.
Even now, as she thought back on how she had been ambushed in Derek's office, she found herself getting
angry. Peter Terrell, the Information Systems Director, could have come to her first. They could have cleared up
the misunderstanding quietly between them. Why did he have to involve Derek and shame her in front of him?
And now, she was sliding back in the company, instead of forward.
Her heated recollections were interrupted as she caught sight of Derek and Roberta coming her way. “Alex, let
me introduce you to Bobbie Newell. Bobbie is the current head of Acme Co.” Then, turning to the other woman,
he continued, “Bobbie, this is Alex Jennings our Operations Manager.”
The two women smiled and shook hands. “Nice to meet you, Alex,” Bobbie said.
“Likewise,” was all Alex could manage to say.
Bobbie broke the uncomfortable pause. “You know, as a Gensui customer, we have always been pleased with
the quality of service we've received from your team, Alex.” She glanced at Derek and added, “In fact, that
consistent high quality was a contributing factor in our decision to pursue this merger.”
Alex tried to focus. “I'm glad,” she said. Then, added, “We're very customer focused.”
Bobbie nodded and there was another pause. Then, Derek suggested he and Bobbie continue their rounds.
Each offered their farewells and Alex was left alone, again. That went well, Alex told herself sarcastically, as she
took a large swallow of wine. Could you have been any lamer?
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3. ------------------------------------------------------- Part 2 -------------------------------------------------------
“I understand that, Brian.” Valerie Wright's voice was raised as she spoke into her phone, but she wasn't afraid of
being overheard. She was alone in the cubicle farm that provided work space for her and a dozen others. It was
late and everyone else was either downtown at the merger gala or at home watching Wheel of Fortune or Family
Guy or doing something—anything—better than what she was doing.
“I'm working as fast as I can on this!” She paused to listen to the reply. “Well, maybe if you let me work, you'll get
it faster. Calling every hour doesn't make the computer work faster!” Valerie slammed down the receiver. “That
guy is driving me crazy,” she vented to the empty room.
The Legal team, at the worst possible time for them—in the midst of the frantic merger activities—had also been
called on to defend Gensui in a copyright infringement lawsuit. The key component of the defense, as it had
been explained to Valerie, was proving that Gensui had been using the disputed product name long before the
opposing litigant was claiming. That involved searching the email system.
At first, it seemed like an easy task that might take a few hours using an automated search. That idea now
seemed like a dream Valerie had or a hallucination. The overworked, fatigued Email Administrator had been
working 12, 14, and eventually, 16 hour days and all the previous weekend on the search. Meanwhile all her
regular work was getting backlogged.
When Brian Hamilton, Gensui's Chief Counsel, had first made the search request, a seeming saving grace was
that Gensui had been using IBM Domino's built-in journaling capabilities for more than a year, and it was all
working fine. Each mail server collected messages as they arrived and placed them in a local mail journal
database. Each day, a new journal was created automatically by Domino.
There were initial growing pains in the early days of implementing journaling. Every week or so, Valerie had to
manually move the old journals off the mail servers to a dedicated server for on-going retention. Eventually,
though, she “contracted” one of the Application Developers with a free lunch to write a little script for her to move
the inactive journals to the storage server automatically on a schedule.
The whole process just worked and, except for allocating more SAN space a couple of months back, Valerie
barely had to monitor it. All that had changed. Now, it was blowing up. The capture worked fine with the
exception of one small detail. The messages were all encrypted.
On the surface, that appeared to be a good thing. Encryption meant that the journal contents were protected
from unauthorized access. Furthermore, the alternative journaling method, redirecting journal copies to a mail-in
database, had the undesirable side-effects of an unmanaged, endlessly growing database as well as more
router traffic.
During the journaling pilot testing, spot checks and manual searches revealed that all the data was accessible
and discoverable, as long as the Notes ID that encrypted the messages was used. There appeared to be no
down side and, to top it all off, native journaling was free, included with Domino. Therefore, the decision was
made to go with local, encrypted journals.
Valerie was now living with the painful discovery that this seamless decryption only works in the IBM Notes user
interface and not with a scheduled, automated process. As a result, a server-based agent could not see the
contents of the stored messages and, naturally, automated searching was producing useless results.
What could be done? As far as she could see, just one thing: A user-initiated, manual search, one journal at a
time, followed by a copy and paste into a separate database to house the results. At first, this process was
annoying. It quickly grew up to become irritating before it graduated with honors to frustrating and followed that
with a doctorate in maddening.
To make matters worse, Brian was increasingly getting on her back to make good on her promise to deliver the
results in “a day or two,” which was now a week late. Valerie's supervisor, Peter, was supportive of her, knowing
the long hours she was putting in. She could tell, though, that he was getting pressure, too, and wanted her to
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4. complete this project.
While waiting for the current search to finish, she took a minute to calculate her progress. There were 798 daily
journals of various sizes to search and she had finished searching number 201. She was barely twenty-five
percent done. Faced with this depressing fact, Valerie knew she would have to go to Peter in the morning and
confess failure. Maybe they could get an extension on the deadline or get some help to finish.
Exhausted, Valerie put her head on her desk and tried not to cry.
------------------------------------------------------- Part 3 -------------------------------------------------------
The following morning found Peter in his office listening to Brian, who was sitting across from him, ranting about
Valerie's “utter lack of professionalism” and “shocking rudeness.” He knew that, in these situations, it is best just
to listen before responding or taking offense.
Once Brian had vented his frustration, Peter responded. “It's a stressful time for all of us, Brian. And Val has
been working double time to get this request completed. I'm sure that is taking a toll on her.”
“That's no excuse,” Brian shot back.
“I agree. It's not an excuse,” Peter offered, “just a reason. Listen, I'll talk with her and we'll get this straightened
out. Don't worry.”
Brian seemed to calm down, even if he may have been fuming on the inside. With nothing more to say, he rose
and left. Peter took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was a lot going on and he would like to solve at
least one problem before two or three new ones cropped up. He picked up his desk phone and pressed a single
button on the keypad.
When the person on the other end answered, he said, “Val, I know you are beyond swamped. But, I need to see
you sooner, rather than later, please.” After a pause, he added, “Great, see you in a few minutes.”
When his email administrator appeared a short time later, he noticed how haggard she looked. She looked so
run down and exhausted, in fact, he began to wonder if she had gone home last night at all.
As she slumped into a chair, Peter asked, “How much sleep did you get last night, Val?”
“About two hours on the couch in the lunch room.”
“Oh, Val,” Peter replied softly. “I really appreciate your dedication to this, but I don't want it to kill you, and it looks
like it's halfway to doing that.”
Val did not respond.
“How is it going, anyway?”
“Not good,” Valerie began. “There's no way to get through all the journals. I'm barely a quarter of the way done.
So...,” she trailed off. Her body language conveyed defeat.
“Okay, Val. Let's get you some help. Do you have any ideas?”
She shrugged.
“I do. I got an email yesterday from Sherpa Software. Apparently, they can do Journal decryption and searching
or something like that. Let me find the email.” After a brief pause, he continued. “Here it is... Yes, they can
decrypt native Domino journals and make them ready for automated searching.” He looked up at Val and asked,
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5. “Does that sound like what we need?”
She just nodded.
“Okay, Val. Here is what we'll do. First, you're done for the day. Go home and sleep. Come in tomorrow. In the
meantime, I will get on the phone with Sherpa and get the ball rolling on this service they offer. Then, tomorrow,
I'll pass them on to you to get started. How does that sound”
“Okay.”
“Great. Now, go wait at your desk. I'll call a cab to take you home. I don't want you driving.”
Valerie left and Peter set out to make his phone calls. Maybe he would get one problem solved today.
------------------------------------------------------- Part 4 -------------------------------------------------------
Piper's Pub was gradually filling up with lunchtime patrons. The foursome from Gensui Imaging, however, were
already seated in a booth and had their drinks. They alternated between studying the menus of British pub-
inspired choices, glancing at a European soccer match playing out on the large televisions, and chatting about
topics both personal and business.
The lunch outing to the Pittsburgh’s Southside had been Peter's idea. He knew that everyone involved in the
litigation and journal search project needed a break, especially since the more frantic parts had wrapped up. He
naturally included Valerie, who was across from him, and Brian seated at his right. Rounding out the group was
Amber McCarthy, one of Gensui's paralegals, sitting next to Val.
Brian had resisted the notion of lunch, on the grounds of being too busy, when Peter had first invited him. Yet,
Peter had persisted. “Everyone has to eat, Brian,” Peter had said. “An hour or two isn't going to make a
difference and, more to the point, we all need this.” Eventually, Brian had relented.
Had it only been a week since the dramatic meetings with Brian and then Valerie in his office? So much had
happened since then and so much progress had been made that it seemed like months, not mere days, had
passed.
Once Peter had gotten Val on her way home, Peter had engaged Sherpa Software and they had responded
quickly. It turned out that Gensui was not alone in trying to search Domino's encrypted journals and, in response,
Sherpa had developed a low-cost professional services package to solve this exact problem. Once the
agreements were in place, things on the technical side moved rapidly.
The staff at Sherpa had applied some innovative thinking to the problem, too. A technician there had suggested
that, given the volume of data and the tight deadline, they scrape up as many Notes client machines as they
could. By dividing the work up, they were able to get through a complete conversion in just about 21 hours. And
best of all, although the process ran on client machines, it didn't require any manual work once it was started.
Val had loved that part!
The result of the conversion was a set of unencrypted journals that could be searched. Sherpa Software then
went further and provided a temporary license for their Discovery Attender product so that Gensui could use it to
perform the actual search. This proved to be another time saver. The entire turn around had been less than four
days. Getting help from Sherpa Software to get this project done was like a tonic for Valerie. She was back to
her usual upbeat demeanor.
Being able to deliver the result set to Brian had also improved his mood dramatically. It had also helped, not to
mention that Valerie had apologized. It seemed that they were both willing to put the more combustible matters
of the past weeks behind them and move ahead amicably. Thus, it was time to take a brief respite, enjoy each
other socially, and refocus on whatever challenges lay ahead.
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6. About the Author
As the Product Manager for Compliance Attender for Notes, Grant is responsible for
product research and development, pre-sales technical support (e.g., Demos), post-sales
technical support and competitive research.
Grant joined Sherpa Software in 2007 and has 17 years of experience in Information
Technology. Of those, more than 16 were spent building applications with Lotus Notes and
Domino. He worked with a wide range of company sizes and across several industries
including insurance, consulting, venture capital, manufacturing, software and more.
Grant is an IBM Certified Advanced Application Developer and an expert in email
management and compliance, LotusScript, Notes Formula Language, application design and security. He is
also skilled in C/C++ and Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Notes and Domino. Grant is
accomplished in web delivered technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
He graduated in 1995 from the Career Development Institute with a Programmer Analyst Diploma. Grant spends
his off time with his wife, Lydia, of 19 years and their three retired greyhound racers, Rio, Wavorly and Oriole.
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