What To Know About E-Mail Archiving

Without central management, it's unlikely that messages in personal folders will ever be disposed of by users, so folders will continue to grow. Also, search functionality does not operate across multiple personal folders; so in the event of investigation or litigation, each user's hard drive must be searched individually, a costly endeavor. Offline folders, commonly used for e-mail copies by mobile employees with laptops, will reflect changes made to server mailboxes only when the laptop is synchronized with the server. It's possible that duplicate copies of e-mails deleted from the server may still exist on the laptop.

Public folders can be set up in Exchange as a limited solution. This ad hoc approach can be achieved by establishing a hierarchy of public folders that reflects the company's retention schedule and categories. Theoretically, users drag and drop e-mail records into the appropriate public folder, and each folder has an appropriate expiration date attached to it. The problem is that users must be trained to select the proper folder and must be motivated to contemporaneously place record-quality e-mails into the proper folders — an unlikely scenario given productivity demands and e-mail volumes. Also, there is no way to handle event-based retention, such as close-of-audit-plus-six-year policies that call for retention to begin only after an event has occurred.

6. Recognize the need for technology investment. E-mail retention and storage is expensive. Some experts estimate that administrators spend as much as six hours per week recovering old messages for users. Responding to legal discovery can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, too. In a recent gender discrimination suit, UBS Warburg reportedly spent nearly $250,000 producing e-mail for the case. This labor-intensive process entails retrieving and mounting a tape, restoring it to a search environment, searching for pertinent e-mails, printing responsive messages for legal review, then clearing the search milieu and repeating the steps for each succeeding tape. Where e-mails exist on user hard drives, the process is even more costly. Within regulated industries and those subject to investigation or audit, cost justification is relatively simple.

Any technology solution must provide a secure repository, metadata collection and granular message management from creation to final disposition - not just the ability to manage one category such as customer correspondence for a finite period of time. Equally important is the ability to capture contextual information about a message, such as routing, threads, links, embedded items and attachments. Preservation of messages for long periods, the ability to override destruction when necessary, and navigation, search and retrieval functionality are vital needs. Options include systems specialized for e-mail (see "Product Guide: E-Mail Archive Software"), outsourced e-mail vaulting through Iron Mountain and others, and products designed to manage enterprise content such as Documentum, Open Text Livelink and others.

7. Resist the urge to either save everything or print and file. Although appealing in simplicity and possibly defensible on the basis of cost to implement, neither is good policy. While storage is cheap, the cost to review everything at discovery is not. Printing and filing paper copies not only impairs the context for understanding the message exchange, but also loses embedded items, delivery confirmations and other valuable information in the process.

E-mail archiving does not lend itself to the "just get it off my desk" school of problem solving. As with so many other compliance issues these days, e-mail archiving is less likely to be a project with a definite start, middle and end, and more likely to be part of an ongoing program aimed at realistic control. Emerging standards and influential organizations recognize that all records, including e-mail, instant messages and phone text originate as part of business processes. Monitoring, filtering, encryption, collection, management and preservation should be an automatic part of those processes. For this reason, expect e-mail management product architectures to follow the classic trajectory from independent products with their own repositories to inclusion in enterprise content management platforms. Also worth watching is the concept of a single-policy control mechanism, such as IBM's DB2 Records Manager, that can be used across multiple repositories and applications.

Julie Gable is a records management expert and principal of Gable Consulting. Write her at [email protected].