Wallis,
Most ECM vendors that do offer E-mail Management solutions provide you
with a way to do the Big Bucket approach you asked for.
For Example we use TRIM Context and we could create the following
buckets:
Correspondence Administrative (3 FY)
Correspondence Program & Policy (5 FY)
Projects Non-Capital (5 Year)
Projects Capital (15 Years)
Etc...
But we choose to add an additional level of complexity to it. For
example:
Correspondence Administrative / Finance
Correspondence Administrative / Human Resources
Correspondence Program & Policy / Conservation
Correspondence Program & Policy / Master Water Plan
Correspondence Program & Policy / Information Technology Policy
Projects Capital / Tampa Bay Desalination Plant
Projects Capital / C.W. Bill Young Regional Reservoir
Projects Capital / Tampa Bay Regional Surface Water Treatment Plant
We discovered that the extra level of complexity is required for **us**
because of our retention and security needs.
The state retention schedule requires us to keep Project Capital records
for 15 Year after completion of the project. Which would make it
impossible for us to disposition any E-mails that relate to Projects if
we would use the "Big Buckets" method?
Part of the goal of the E-mail Management implementation was to enable
all users to share their E-mails with everybody who needs access to
them. Now to limit the access of some records we apply automatically
access control to e-mails that relate to sensitive categories like
Correspondence Administrative / Human Resources and Correspondence
Program & Policy / Information Technology Policy. The access rights are
given to positions in the agency to avoid a security administration
nightmare.
Currently by a simple drag and drop we can automatically catalog the
E-mails Author (From), Addressee (To, CC, BCC), Records Title (Subject),
Date Created (Date Sent or Received), Container (link between the
outlook container/folder and the TRIM Context container)
Furthermore the E-mail inherits the retention and security requirements
needed.
I cannot give a broad recommendation on what individual companies should
do, because it all depends on their requirement, but I would recommend
all government agencies to stay away from "Big Bucket IT E-mail
Management Solution." Government agencies requirements normally do not
allow a "Big Bucket" solution to be a legal feasible records management
solution.
I hope this enlightened more than it did confuse
Simon T. De Witt
Records Information Analyst
Tampa Bay Water
2575 Enterprise Road
Clearwater, FL 33763-1102
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-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of WALLIS Dwight D
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 1:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [RM] Email archiving systems and document management
systems
Jesse, thank you for your thoughtful response regarding automatic
classification. If I may comment on your response to Larry's interesting
e-mail and then ask a further question of the list:
> but contrast $1000 for 2 terabytes of storage
(yep, at your local consumer electronics store - check it out) vs. the
ease
of retrieval.
According to John Halamka in the March 5, 2007 edition of Computerworld
(helpfully cited in PeterKs RAIN postings), "enterprise class storage"
costs approximately $20K per terabyte. Mr. Halamka is including the
overhead to manage such storage in that figure. I believe most of the
e-mail solutions we are discussing involve enterprise storage solutions,
and I think its important to consider overhead costs (an analogy would
be to say storage of a records carton costs $1.00 because that's what
the box costs). I think storage may be an important metric in
determining the success of a given approach, and is more important an
issue than generally assumed (at least, that's what my good friends in
our IT department are telling me).
> Would you consider that same "three bucket practice" for paper
records? If
not, why would you treat email differently? Email is or isn't a record
according to content, not format...just like any other record.
Jesse, records retention schedules often apply a one-bucket approach to
mass volumes of records. An analogy would be the application of
functional retentions to correspondence. In my mind, an approach that
told users to delete anything they considered non-record or of limited
value, then keep the remainder for x period of time would work for
probably 75% of our users. That period of time would be determined by a
functional retention schedule. I agree with Bob - the same broad based
approaches applied to large volumes of paper can also work for e-mail.
As noted above, with storage as a metric, you could adjust up or down
the degree of control you needed.
However, I absolutely agree with your comments regarding the efficacy of
relying on training/policy only. Even with the simple approach I cite
above, I doubt most users would comply in the sense that they would
properly apply even the most minimum of retention requirements with any
degree of regularity. I think most users know how to use the delete key
in making an immediate decision of the value of a particular e-mail, but
beyond that I have my doubts.
Here's the dilemma - EDMS/ERMS tools that are often demo'd to me seem
overkill for such a big bucket approach. Yet absent those, we are left
with the policy/training approach. Is anyone aware of software solutions
that would support such a basic approach, and apply the retentions in a
background manner - for example, to an entire users stored e-mail, or
even to selected "big bucket" folders within that system? I'm unaware of
any such capability in current standard office/e-mail systems, nor do my
IT friends seem aware of such a capability.
Dwight "keep it simple and cheap" Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Fleet, Records, Electronics, Distribution and Stores
(FREDS)
1620 S.E. 190th Avenue
Portland, OR 97233
Phone: (503)988-3741
Fax: (503)988-3754
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