I got several responses to my earlier inquiry that basically confirmed
my suspicions. To recap, we are a relatively small company (about 300
employees) with decent monetary resources and we are not subject to SOX
or FOIA, nonetheless the CFO wants to make sure we retain everything we
should be. He wants our IT department to find some sort of a program
that will capture all email as it comes into our servers, before being
distributed to employees inboxes. His concern is that employees will
delete something that should be saved.  My concern with this idea is the
wasted resources used in capturing the vast amounts of junk email that
is not getting filtered out. I believe we should go for a true EDMS
system in which employees are trained to file their e-docs like they do
their paper docs.
 
While he understands in theory that email is just like any other record,
the CFO cannot believe that companies have employees look at each email
and decide whether or not it should be kept. He is adamantly convinced
that large companies must have some sort of automated system that does
this for them. I even tried Bill Roach's example of likening it to
copying all paper junk mail that comes in the door before distributing
the mail, but he doesn't see it as the same. He will, however, discuss
with IT how they can better filter the emails before capturing them.
 
Am I off base here? Do many companies use automated programs to capture
and index email? How well do they work and how much programming must be
done to "teach" it what to keep? If not done automatically, how do you
actually go about capturing those records? Or are most of you in the
same boat we are, just now trying to figure it out?
 
Nolene Sherman
Records Manager
CJ Segerstrom & Sons * South Coast Plaza
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