Word List File search and export issues

[oldmanmike]

I'm evaluating this product (currently 1.0 1005 32 bit free version) for ediscovery purposes. So far, it's been straightforward, but have run into two problems:

1) With my wordlist file, quotes have been removed. I've been asked to find instances where "John Smith" and "taking vacation" (and 30+ more items with "John Smith" both appear in files and e-mails. The word search file has multiple rows with "John Smith" and the secondary search terms, but the history and results show the quotes are missing from John Smith.

2) The results are showing up pretty quickly, but I'm in need of a more efficient way to export all of the items so I can provide it to my legal team. If I have four word search files, each with 30 rows, that's a lot of right clicking within email, image and file tabs. Is there a bulk export that would allow me to dump all of the results off to a folder so I could burn a disk?

Thanks in advance. I was looking at other products, but this seems the most reasonably priced and seems pretty complete so far.


OldManMike

[David (PassMark)]

I am a bit confused about the description of the 1st issue.

If I understand you correctly you have created a text file with a list of search terms, and are using this as a word list file to do bulk searching.

You stated that "quotes have been removed" from the file. If this was the case then it would be normal to find that the searches and search history also don't contain quotes.

I don't think I understand your problem. If the question is about the search syntax, you can find a summary of the syntax here,
http://www.passmark.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3055

Regarding the exporting. I would suspect that not every search would return results. So not everything would need to be exported.

At the moment there is no way to export the results from several different searches in a single action. But we'll add it to the to do list.

But there is also this work around that might solve your problem. The results from every search executed are cached as part of the case. The cache file is in XML format, and is easy to read with a text editor. So these cache files might be all you need if you are only after a document list.

The cache folder is here,
C:\Users\<YourUserName>\Documents\PassMark\OSForen sics\Cases\<YourTestCase>\Index\<SearchIndexName>\ History

[oldmanmike]

Word file search - missing quotes

Thanks for the reply. It's unfortunate about the export option. That's going to be a killer for me. I have to provide legal with the files themselves, so I guess I know what my day will be wrapped up in.

On the missing quotes, the word list file has a line that looks like the following:

"John Smith" "Legal Discovery"

I'm hoping here to find docs and e-mails with both phrases, not for words that might have John and Discovery. They must contain both phrases.

The results of the search in the History tab of the search index shows:

John Smith "Legal Discovery"

This ends up giving me results with John and the phrase "Legal Discovery" as well as Smith and "Legal Discovery", which is not what I'm looking for.

[David (PassMark)]

For the export issue. We will add a function to export everything in a single action, but it won't be available until release V1.1. Which at the moment is planned for mid Jan 2012.

It would also be possible to write a script to parse the XML and get the file paths, then do a file copy on each file. But by the time you have written such a script you probably could have done the job manually. Doing a file copy from DOS would also mess up the file dates.

I tried to reproduce the search history issue you described, but couldn't. Including two phrases worked into a wordlist file worked as expected for me, with the quotes being preserved.

My guess at this point is that maybe you aren't using real quotes. Maybe instead of a double quote you have double apostrophes? Or maybe reverse quotes, like what is used in Microsoft word.
e.g.
'' '' instead of " "
or
“ ” instead of " "
Needed to make the font large to see the difference. Even so double apostrophes looks the same as a double quote, but will function differently.

If you still have a problem can you send us your word list file?

[oldmanmike]

Quotes

Let me re-create the wordfile and do it strictly in notepad. I was cutting and pasting from a Word file, so I could see this messing things up.

Thank you for the update on the export. I'll see what our Legal team has to say about what they need.

OldManMike

[oldmanmike]

Wordfile issue was my fault

I took your advice and checked the quotes. The quotes were open and closed quotes. I need do my future file building in notepad versus Word.

I look forward to the 1.1 release next year for the bulk export, and hopefully better e-mail options. I can open files, but e-mails end up being found in searches but I can't actually open them. Is this a feature that will be addressed in the next release?

[David (PassMark)]

Yes, you should be able to open E-Mails directly from the search results. Even in the current version this should be OK.

Let me check, we might be able to give you a early V1.1 release this week to test.

[Ray (PassMark)]

Over the last week of development, we added indexing of email attachments, so you can search their content and browse them in a separate result tab. You can also extract them from their email via right-click and add the extracted attachment file to your case. This will all be part of the next public release.

We didn't manage to complete the mass export features this week, so it'll be included in the features over the first couple of weeks of development in January 2012. Check back soon.