My experience with Postini is that it is a one size fits none solution for 
"records management'. Postini (or Google Message Discovery / GMD) is designed to 
establish a single retention period for all messages collected by the system. It 
generally journals every single message sent to or from Google Apps, regardless 
of value. The retention you set generally applies to all messages, so the 
retention period treats email as a record type, rather than the content as the 
deciding factor. There may have been a few tweaks more recently where untagged 
messages can be discarded at a different pace than tagged messages, but I 
haven't been following it that closely.

For a brief overview of GMD see: http://www.google.com/postini/discovery.html

I saw a brand new vendor at the ARMA Conference that suggests that they have a 
proper means of managing objects in Google Apps. This is not an endorsement, but 
is the first company that I've encountered that purports to have a solution in 
this space. The company is RecMan (http://www.recman.net). Again, no 
endorsement, but might be worth talking to.

As you discuss your needs with Google / Postini, expect to hear them use the 
term "immutable email archive". That is the mantra I have heard several 
different times. Google / Postini believes that having every email journaled is 
the proper solution to litigation needs and that you should keep all email a 
uniform period of time, regardless of other value, because you can then 
demonstrate that you haven't had employees engage in selective destruction / 
spoliation.

I'm curious to know if Google's thinking is evolving.
 Patrick Cunningham, CRM, FAI
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"Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier." 
-- Colin Powell 

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