Were David Henry and his staff the right people to pursue an inquiry? After all it appears that they were incapable of opening a Outlook .pst (personal storage table) file because it wasn’t in a format that another email system – groupwise.
And this appears to have held them up for days. That is interesting because they had the files before they requested permission from Peter Dunne
I’m incredulous that this can be the case. Because it literally takes minutes to use google to find the answer to do conversions from pst to groupwise or anything else. .pst is such an ancient format that has had export/import systems to every other format created.
“convert pst“, amongst other things, brings up an advertisement for Transcend’s group of mail convertors. Despite it sounding like an ad, I’d have to say these are still amongst my favourite no-nonsense convertors for shifting email systems from proprietary formats to something useable. I’ve used then converting many systems as it also preserves almost all of the detail. It even has a free version that will convert the few emails that they requested and that says
To receive a free working trial version of a Transend software product please fill in and submit the requested information below. Once the registration is accepted by our system you will automatically be presented with software download options. This may take up to 15 seconds. If the page does not display or you get an error, please contact us as noted below.
Of course that 15 seconds and the few more second to download the file is dwarfed by the 2 days that the Henry enquiry were (apparently) unable to open those emails. Reading the emails, the only reason that they didn’t open and read the emails was because of an inability to use google!
Sure I know it takes time to get any software on a government computer because of the security considerations. But it seems to me that one of the most crucial things that a group of people in government running an enquiry would need would be conversion software. In legal circles this process is known as eDiscovery and is done precisely because it carries critical metadata that is beyond what could be put in a paper document, or even the eventual HTML format that was being promised 6 days later.
It isn’t rocket science and the tools are available in a simple google query. I’d have expected that any enquiry would be equipped with them. Unless of course it was more expedient that they were not…
It is also pleasant to observe that Pete George has now found a useful and productive egress for his obsessional behaviour. Good posts.
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