IT @ Stone Pigman: E-mail Emergency
Janine Sylvas, Law Technology News
April 1, 2006 – Stone Pigman is a medium-sized firm, with 54 lawyers located in one office in the central business district of New Orleans—less than one mile from the Mississippi River. The day after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the world we knew seemed to be coming to an end. The words, "It really happened" kept playing through my mind.
This was not what I had in mind for the week of August 29, 2005. I had just returned from the International Legal Technology Association meeting in Phoenix. My plan was to continue working on our IT department's business continuity/disaster recovery plan. I didn't expect to experience actively working through the plan and modifying on the fly as we actually experienced disaster recovery.
After the levees broke, 80 percent of the city was under water. Power was non-existent in the city and cell phone towers were down. Communications ceased to exist unless you were sober enough to think of text messaging.
No communication! Many thoughts raced through my mind: What are our clients thinking? They can't contact us! We don't know what's actually going on in New Orleans. Is water in our building? How are we going to contact our employees? It's a lonely and frightening feeling when you're trying to get in touch with someone and you can't because you can't reach them by cell phone or e-mail.
Two days after the storm, I was sitting in the office of the Long Law Firm in Baton Rouge and actively working through the steps to set up a network in a second location. Plans were set to lease space next to their office. By this time, servers were ordered and the integrators were waiting for them to arrive. Thankfully, our backup tapes made it to their destination and critical applications within the firm had been identified.
Right before Katrina, we were updating our business continuity/disaster recovery plan. One of the lessons learned during Katrina is that we were correct about our assumptions that communications would be a top priority. It turned out to be the biggest issue for us during our recovery.
The week prior to the storm, at ILTA, I had spoken to Brian Parks, director of account management for the legal group at MessageOne, regarding its EMS E-mail continuity product. They were one of the vendors we were contemplating for an e-mail continuity system, which we realized we needed for potential e-mail outages.
Upon returning to New Orleans, we had planned to meet to discuss their product in detail.
Our meeting would take place sooner than expected. Parks tracked me down to see if we needed assistance with getting our e-mail flowing again.
He had the presence of mind to go to our website, which had been updated with contact information and the status of the firm and staff.
Brian said the work would be pro bono. It was a breath of fresh air to hear the voice on the other end willing to help in our time of need.
If the e-mail continuity system worked, I could breathe a temporary sigh of relief because our clients would actually be able to e-mail the firm. They would know we were in the process of restoring firm operations and servicing them in a reasonable amount of time. E-mail service would be a strong first step to restoring normalcy.
MessageOne's EMS E-mail Continuity is a Linux-based system that synchronizes with your primary e-mail environment. When an emergency or outage occurs, it can be activated over the web or by phone. In 60 seconds, e-mail users have access to a web-based e-mail account that allows users to send and receive e-mail from their standard e-mail address.
Because we did not have their system in place, MessageOne had to manually create accounts for our users. Normally, the sync manager software will auto-discover users, their aliases, contact lists, distribution lists, calendar appointments, and historical e-mail. We added MessageOne as a secondary mail exchange (MX) record at which point everything was set up and ready to test.
What better way to test the product than this? Within a matter of hours, our e-mails were no longer bouncing and clients were able to send e-mails to the firm. In addition, they were able to support Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices, which helped our lawyers send and receive e-mails via their PDAs. We are now a regular customer of MessageOne. We installed its Sync Manager and Primary Controller software and created a service account with appropriate permissions. Mail routing was already configured by adding them as a secondary MX record.
Now we are secure in knowing that if there is a power outage or maintenance needs to be performed on the server, we can continue to communicate with the world, and are ready for anything Mother Nature sends our way in 2006.
Janine Sylvas, is IT director at Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann, based in New Orleans. She is the 2005 LTN IT Director of the Year.
