-----Larry Medina  wrote -----
<snip>

Now, what we're seeing done more often is organizations are making "copies"
of ALL incoming e-mail at the incoming server and writing all of these
messages to an "E-mail Management System", which is simply a MASSIVE store
of all of the messages, and in some cases, these "EMS" perform some level
of indexing of the messages, maybe based on recipient name, date, subject
and in some extreme cases, they go all the way to the level of CONTENT
INDEXING all the messages.  However, the messages are then handled in a
manner typically determined by the IT/IS organization responsible for
managing the system and the related data stores they generate... and
similar to the statement above about local server backups, this is
generally done in accordance with some IT policy/practice that (hopefully)
the RIM department was involved in developing the retention for.

The problem is the existence of these "EMS" are seldom made known to the
users in the organization and what this results in is a situation where
multiple copies of some information is being managed by different parts of
the organization, with neither of them communicating about who is doing
what and why and IF RIM isn't involved in the process, many records (and
some non-records) being retained either much longer then necessary or being
discarded much sooner than required... and in the event of a legal action,
the strong possibility that the organization will find itself in a
situation similar to what happened to Price-Waterhouse-Coopers in the case
above.

In addition, the fact that an organization HAS a retention schedule and an
RIM Policy in-force, but it's not being followed universally by the entire
organization can be potentially viewed as spoliation.

<snip>

Larry


--------- reply -----------

Larry (and others)

The National Archives of Australia has just published an 'Archives Advice'
saying that ''Email archiving solutions are not recordkeeping solutions'.
It is available at
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/rkpubs/advices/advice69.html.

I wrote it, so in this case, my views ARE the views of my employer.

John Lovejoy
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National Archives of Australia

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
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