Ray Cunningham asked about SOX compliance and retention in MS Exchange
(Outlook) Systems.

Rather than go into every detail of trying to conduct records management
in Exchange, I'm going to focus on what I feel are the most cumbersome
aspects of e-mail management - classification and disposition.

My experience with MS Exchange has NOT led me to believe that it offers
any disposition functionality. There's no way to classify a document
within Exchange as belonging to a particular record series and therefore
no way to identify a document as ready for disposition.

I think the closest you could come to a retention program using MS
Exchange would be to create a departmental folder structure in Outlook
linked to the retention schedule, then train users how to classify
e-mail and file it in the folders. Disposition would be a manual process
carried out by selecting items from each folder past their retention
period and deleting them.  This is an inferior solution when compared to
a "proper" EDMS with electronic linkages to the retention schedule
through indexing.  An EDMS should also offer you the advantage of
automated disposition reporting.

I'm sorry I can't offer you an opinion specifically related to SOX, but
that's my two cents based on my understanding of good records
management.

Alicia Mallory
Systems Analyst
The University of Texas System

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