Kelley Drye is a New York City–based law firm with a long history in litigation excellence. It can trace its history back to 1836. Kelley Drye attributes its continued success to the expertise and hard work of its attorneys and other professionals who work together to prevent problems for their clients and to minimize the impact of those issues that do occur. The firm also recognizes the role that technology brings to building its competitive advantage. Kelley Drye makes extensive investments in knowledge management, litigation support, and work-product retrieval technology to continually drive greater efficiency, service quality, and client savings.

In 2007, Kelley Drye began evaluating how it acquired and managed its software asset portfolio. The firm had been licensing software from different vendors as needed and, as a result, had built up a sizable collection of third-party products. This piecemeal approach to software acquisition, which solved immediate needs, has its drawbacks. It is not cost effective to buy redundant software or pay for applications with overlapping capabilities, and it’s a drain on IT resources to ensure that heterogeneous systems work together. It is also difficult to administer a large number of licenses and vendor relationships.

There’s an old adage in IT that ‘nothing ever goes away’. Retiring legacy systems is a painful, often expensive process, mostly because every system has some useful information in it, but it’s hard to distinguish jewels from junk within that information. There are times when migrating all your content and cutting over to a shiny new system is the right thing to do, and there are many strong content migration products on the market. Sometimes, however, a total migration is simply not necessary nor useful.

I’m a hopeless book hound, and in my life have spent more on books than on cars. I have thousands of books. The last time we moved, we had 60 boxes of books, and my wife made me a proposition: We would unpack the five boxes that contained the books we knew we wanted, and leave the rest in the basement for two years. Over the next two years, I opened a few more boxes and pulled out what I needed. At the end of the two years we donated the rest to the local library. Needless to say, our bookshelves were much more organized, and had a lot less junk.

I’ve been working on a custom search project recently and ran into an issue that had me scratching my head.  My FAST Content SSA wasn’t able to crawl successfully crawl content.  When I kicked off a full crawl it wouldn’t fail, but it would continue to run until I manually stopped it, never returning a single error, warning, or anything.  When I looked at the Event Viewer on the SharePoint Server I saw this: