Since I started this thread, I thought I should chime in to say that I have been following it with great interest and want to thank all who have responded so far. It's been extremely helpful to have so many facets of this thorny issue so articulately addressed. FYI, since we have about 10,000 employees world-wide and minimal RIM infrastructure in place, I suspect that the approach outlined below will be the one we end up taking, at least for the near term. I agree with Jesse - given the alternatives, we'll be better off than we are now. Cheers, Suzanne Mrozak Associate Director Records and Document Management Services Genzyme Corporation 500 Kendall Street Cambridge, MA 02142 [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jesse Wilkins Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 10:51 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Email archiving systems and document management systems I agree with Steve here and would additionally note that given the current state of automatic classification tools vs. the overwhelming volume of email most organizations receive, many organizations are choosing to do what they can vs. trying to apply traditional records best practices that don't scale. If the average employee receives 110 emails/day (and I think that's the last stat I saw from Radicati), that's 2200/month or 26,400/year per employee. A recent client of mine has 23,000 employees. That's 607 MILLION emails per year to have to manage. Now some of you will say "But Jesse, not all of those are records and have to be managed!" You're half right: not all of them are records. But someone still has to make the determination as to record or not and then do something with the record messages...and if that's only 5% of all of them that's still 30.4 million email records to be dealt with, declared as records, classified, indexed, etc. At the same time, most organizations' classification structures are all but opaque to users who don't have an MLIS or other appropriate info architecture background - and that's almost all of them. So a) the users cannot do it, at least not easily, and b) there aren't enough records managers on the planet to do even just the email. A better approach might just be to combine email archiving with the full-text indexing capabilities of many of the email messaging applications/gateways/appliances available. I'm not saying that this is the desired end state necessarily, but faced with the alternatives of doing nothing, doing a little tiny bit as exception, or archiving and full-text indexing, I know which one I'd recommend. Jesse Wilkins CDIA+, edp, LIT, ICP, ermm, ecmm J Wilkins & Associates [log in to unmask] blog: http://informata.blogspot.com (303) 574-1455 office (303) 484-4142 fax -----Original Message----- From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steve Petersen Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 7:41 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Email archiving systems and document management systems Glen, While agreeing in general that archiving all mail off to an archive isn't good RIM there may be instances where the archiving of mail considered a record could be adequate and acceptable from a risk standpoint for a company. This would depend on the particular companies situation (non-regulated) and risk management strategy. To me having a process and following it consistently is better than no process at all The archiving solution could also be a step in moving toward good RIM and at the same time lower both liability and cost to a company. While full management of messages in an ERM is best practice an interim step of bucketing messages into record series categories could be beneficial in movement toward that best practice. It's been a sort double edged sword at my employer as its worked well from an IT /legal side ,not quite as well from the RIM side but its better than it was and the next step will involve less change management and be almost transparent to the end -user. Again its a matter of putting a good plan together and gaining the management /end-user approval needed to keep moving the process toward a best practice endstate. Small steps- small wins can move a RIM program toward the best practice endstate while not causing major chaos in the enterprise. My 2 cents Steve Petersen CRM Records Manager Rockwell Collins Inc 319.295.5244 "Bringing Order Out of Chaos" List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance