Separate source processing and case creation

[dale]

I know that the team are working on increasing the flexibility of the way that sources can be added and removed and possibly cases being merged etc.

 

However, as a thought-exercise, what about separating sources and cases? This would mean that any source that is processed is added to a pool. From this pool of processed sources are then used to build cases. Such an approach would have the advantage that the processing of sources could be distributed and that once processed, sources could be used in more than one case. Also the entire process of building a (large) case would become less prone to catastrophic failure in case a fatal errors occurs during the processing of one of the sources.

 

Another suggestion: Ever created a case with 100+ sources? There is far too much clicking and menus involved. This takes a lot of time and is prone to errors. It would be real helpful if one could select processing options and then have them applied to a list of sources rather than individual sources only.

[AdamS]

I agree with the difficulties when adding multiple sources, however I suspect it's done that way to give some granular control over having different processing options for different source types. For me, when I'm processing multiple sources I tend to have them all located in a single parent folder then I just select that folder for processing. As long as 'process subfolders' is ticked then there are no issues and you can have multiple different source types (PST, docs, pics etc).

 

I'm not sure how having a pool of processed sources might work, my understanding is that when a source is processed a database is created as part of the indexing process. If you have multiple processed sources you are going to have multiple databases which won't work together. I suspect having the ability to merge cases would need to be in place first before this type of pool based sources would be workable, but I could be wrong.