Notes on tooling

What follows is about the tools and working methods I use in IT assignments, and about why the choice fell on those tools. Per tool: what it does, how I put it to work, what it costs and where it disappoints.

The navigation follows the order of the work. Data collection is about bringing material together centrally and in a structured way. Secure transfer is about what comes next: how it leaves the building, and how you can still show afterwards that nothing was altered on the way.

Who this is for

For fellow gerechtsdeskundigen. A gerechtsdeskundige is a court-appointed expert under Belgian law: appointed by a judge, working for the court rather than for a party, and not the party-retained expert witness of the common-law systems. For the colleague who has to do the same thing tomorrow: scope a mailbox, filter an export, assemble a bundle that is still traceable two years later. Lawyers and judges who want to understand what sits behind a technical report are reading along.

There are concrete figures in here: turnaround times, licence costs, volumes. Without those figures what remains is the prose the vendors already publish themselves, and that helps nobody who has to estimate an assignment.

Why

What I worked out the hard way, the next person should not have to work out again. Most of this was written down nowhere, or was written down somewhere but in the manual of a vendor with an interest in leaving out the sharp edges.

What you will not find here

Not one case, not one party, not one file. The figures and methods on this site have been detached from the context they came from and deliberately mixed: no combination of numbers on a page describes a single real investigation. No findings either, because what an investigation established belongs in the report to the court.

Why that works the way it does, and where the limits are, is on the colophon.