Legal Discovery in Archived Meeting Maker Data

Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

I know, cliche does not become us, but it's apt in this case.

The topic is legal discovery.  A client has scads of backups of Meeting Maker server data back to the turn of the century and needs to do legal discovery on it. 

Our previous modus operandi required a full calendar insertion (meaning significant computer lab resources and expertise) and a PST export.  But after noodling on this we thought -- let's use our tool that we originally built for Zimbra insertions!  It produces ICS files which we inserted into Zimbra but are also readable in Outlook and as text!

Here's how it works:

We convert Meeting Maker export into our intermediate Access format and run zinsert (either for one user or the entire server of users if you prefer).

If you use a text editor to look at them they look like this (readable, but let's face it, geeky):

If you list them as an external file in Outlook (which does not involve IMPORTING them) - they look a lot more like calendars:

and can even be searched and displayed as a list: