We recently put into place a retention program for Outlook using using  
managed folders in Symantic's Enterprise Vault.  During the transition  
the one thing I notice again and again is that people use Outlook as a  
filing cabinet for reference material rather than saving those items  
to their local hard drive or department shared drive. One of our users  
even goes so far as to email herself stuff so that she can put it into  
a subfolder in her inbox. Another woman kept templates for frequently  
used documents attached to an email, so that, when she was in the  
field, could just access her webmail client and forward that email to  
customers.

We have emphasized that the managed folders should be only for company  
records, so I'm getting a lot of questions about what they should do  
with this other, useful stuff. I'm hearing that people keep stuff in  
Outlook because it's easier to find. It seems that we need a much  
better tool than MS Search for finding stuff on our hard drives. I  
know there is Google desktop (or whatever it's called), but at least  
at my last company, IT didn't want us to use that and would delete it  
whenever it was discovered.

Until I can come up with a better plan, I've been telling users they  
can put this material into a folder called "Reference" (where they can  
make any subfolders they need) into one of the medium term records  
managed folders. But that still leaves a bunch of stuff in our email  
vault. I'm hoping by sequestering it it will be easier to separate it  
for discovery and in the future if we want to pluck those out and put  
them somewhere better.

What are others using to manage those useful bits of info that aren't  
records and don't really fit anywhere else, but should be kept around  
for a while.


Nolene Sherman
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Tracking where records are kept is what Tiggers and Records Managers  
do best!

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