The Issue: Required Data is Locked in Obscure Legacy System
A Fortune 100 company with numerous national and international divisions faced discovery requests involving a legacy help desk system with a proprietary database back-end. The organization’s counsel needed to review some 450 thousand help desk tickets with attachments, but the only export format provided by the legacy system was EBCDIC fixed length files – a format that is completely unreadable on a modern PC. To further complicate matters, the attachments were only loosely linked to the original records, and filenames were lost during the export process.
The Solution: Customized Conversion Tools Create Usable Deliverable
Altep’s technology experts developed custom software to process the fixed length files and output ASCII files with linked attachments in standard document layout. The resulting native documents and attachments were then loaded into a web-based review platform, and counsel was able to examine the materials quickly and easily using normal document review procedures.
The Impact: One-of Tools Become Standard Offering
Subsequently, Altep has integrated variants on the EBCDIC processing toolset into its standard service offering, to the benefit of several other clients. The client for whom the solution was initially developed continues to collect and review help desk tickets via Altep’s processing and hosting services; to date, the collection has grown to more that five million documents.