Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Best of Breed? Iterasi and Social Media Archiving
September 9, 2010
Perhaps I'm getting old and jaded – so many companies have made so many claims with respect to what they can do with social media archiving and e-discovery readiness and I haven't been impressed. Some of the products are more talk than substance. Some are entirely vaporware. Others puff themselves with claims which, when investigated, fall far short of the reality. The answer to "Does it really do that?" is often "no."
So I was surprised to find myself very much impressed with Iterasi's TrueArchive technology, which distinguishes itself from competitors (and another happy surprise, Iterasi's Chase Reeves spoke very respectfully of competitors Hanzo, PageFreezer and Cloud Preservation) by virtue of the fact that it archives social media/blog pages from within the browser rather than through the traditional crawl the code, collect and reassemble the pages method. I asked Chase to explain this as simply as possible and here's what he wrote:
"Iterasi's TrueArchive technology allows us to capture digital carbon copies of even very dynamic and complex webpages. This is a proprietary technology we developed to enable archiving of technologies like AJAX, Javascript, etc. Part of the process is actually controlling a browser to render the page and archiving from within the rendered page, after all the scripts have settled down.
This process is different than "crawl and capture" type of archiving where many of the dynamic scripts are captured along with the static content. With Iterasi you get an exact copy of all data on the page at the time of archive. In "crawl and capture" archiving a page will often replay the dynamic script instead of the valid archived data from the exact time the page was captured; e.g., displaying current stock market information instead of the stock market info from the exact date and time of the archive.
Iterasi's web archiving engine was built from the ground up to provide accurate archives of web content for the strictest compliance regulations and the most important legal matters."
Both John and I were given a demo of the product and both of us were impressed by the capabilities. Nothing is perfect – right now, TrueArchive can't handle Flash without cutomization - once again, we appreciated Chase's readiness to admit a product limitation. Currently, it also doesn't handle video, but the next version will do so. Candor (obviously) goes a long way with us.
The obvious question was "how much?"
As Chase shared with me, pricing is largely determined by the number of pages to be archived each month and the number of times each month the site spider is used. When I asked him to give me a couple of concrete examples so readers could get a feel for the pricing, I didn't get the usual runaround – he said "sure" and here's what he gave me:
Small Company:
– Twitter archives of 10 people (in real-time)
– Facebook page archived daily
– 50 page company website archived weekly
– Blog archived as new posts go live
# of Pages per Month: 250-500
Cost per Month: $250-$450
Large Company:
– Facebook page archived daily
– 1k-2k page company website archived weekly
# of Pages per Month: 4k-8k
Cost per Month: $800-$4,000
John and I are happy to doff our caps to Iterasi. Nice job – this is one of the best products we've recently had a chance to tinker with. Thanks for letting us into the sandbox to play guys - and for making a valuable contribution to the rapidly moving area of social media archiving and e-discovery readiness. I know that colleagues Mary Mack and Rob Robinson, who watch this space carefully, have also spoken highly of your product – keep up the good work!
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