Let me be clear here. Lotus Notes is anything but dead. Lotus Notes is an active, vibrant messaging technology with many strengths far in excess of Outlook and Exchange. To characterize Lotus Notes as either wooden wagon wheel technology or Betamax tapes is so far off from the technical and commercial reality as to be ludicrous.

And here's where it gets dangerous. If you think Lotus Notes is an obsolete technology, then migrating off of it, even in a build-up to war, might make sense. But when you realize that Notes is anything but obsolete, then you must ask deeper questions, like why did a migration occur at such a critical time, or did the White House IT staff know so little about messaging technology to make such a mischaracterization?

Crazy costs and looking for love in all the wrong places
Finally, I'll hit on some other crazy comments coming out of the hearings. First, Payton provided the Committee with estimated costs for data recovery. I understand that our government likes to spend like a drunken sailor on leave, but Payton's claims for recovery costs are off the chart. For example, she said that doing a single "component" restore from a "disaster recovery backup" is $50K.

She's saying it costs $50,000 simply to load a backup tape and recover some files. That's just plain silly. We're talking about mounting a tape or a disk and running a program. You can buy an IT guy for nearly a year for $50,000. But if it takes that IT guy a full year to run one restore, that's a dude you need to fire.

Also from the Wildly Exaggerated Claims Department, Payton said it would cost $500,000 to buy the servers to do the restores. That's quite off the mark.

I just checked with the Dell site. A nice PowerEdge server with 4GB of RAM and four one-terabyte hard drives is $4,377. A half a million bucks will buy you 114 of these servers. And yet, if there are 5,000 PST files with 2GB data each as claimed, you can fit that on less than three of these Dell servers. Even if you went balls to the wall and bought ten such servers, with a capacity of 40 terabytes, you'd spend $43,770, not $500,000.

I don't begrudge the government spending my tax dollars. After all, if I kept my money, I might use it to buy my own servers. But what I do object to is using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

Finally, once again, I need to hit back on the theme of the missing records and use of the RNC email system. When the White House IT people were asked by the Committee members about the RNC email data, they claimed a complete lack of knowledge, stating that the RNC data was outside of their job responsibilities.

And yet, if the Committee really wants to find out the truth of what's out there, and if we really want a comprehensive record of what went on at the White House, it's the RNC records we're going to want. So far, nobody claims to own this problem and the Committee seems unable to force the White House to produce RNC data. Here's what Chairman Henry Waxman had to say on this matter:

The Archives also asked the White House to start recovering official emails that the Republican National Committee deleted pursuant to its policy of regularly purging emails from its servers. These repeated requests have also been rebuffed. In fact, the RNC has informed our Committee that it has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House emails from backup tapes containing past RNC email records.