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• > Email Retention
• > Email Platform Migration

Email Retention

It is an accepted fact that corporate email includes business records or in certain circumstances, controlled records. CR’s are usually records with privileged information such as social insurance numbers, loan numbers, credit card numbers etc. An email retention policy informs employees what email needs to be archived and for how long.

As much as 75 per cent of a company’s intellectual property is housed within its messaging system. And a recent study by Osterman Research found that the majority of us don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time we’re working on a new message – more than 90 per cent of email users refer to old email when composing new email. An archive offers a company access to a rich repository of corporate knowledge through an easy-to-use search interface.

Your policy for how email and IM will be used and retained by your company should be developed with input from across the organization. Give IT, legal, HR, compliance, customer relations, and administrative departments a seat at the policy planning table – and make sure international divisions of the company have a voice, too.

Policy Management Challenges

As your company embarks on creating policies the following guidelines should be considered when setting guidelines.

• DO create two policies: One for retention of emails and IMs, and another for company-wide usage of email and IM. These will be separate policies, but it’s important that they’re developed side by side. Both should be reviewed and updated annually.
  
  
• DO communicate your usage policy with all employees: Not just through email, but through face-to-face training and discussion in department meetings. Be specific and detailed. It’s important that everyone in the company understand both appropriate and inappropriate use of email and IM, and that violating usage guidelines is a punishable offence. Employees should also know that copies of everything they send are being archived (this knowledge alone often results in fewer instances of inappropriate messaging).
  
  
• DON’T delay archiving in the absence of a retention policy: Ideally, the policy comes first and dictates the parameters of the archive’s setup. But for many companies, a policy can take months to develop and gain consensus on – and most aren’t willing to risk a damaging non-compliance situation or costly eDiscovery process in the meantime. A flexible in-house archiving solution can easily be adapted as your policy takes shape.

Policy Management – How It Works

Managing the day to day policies that pertain to email is a big task, one that if manually performed will consume precious resources; Jatheon’s Plug n Comply appliances have the ability to review messages in real-time for user created rules.

Policies can be applied to all messages received by the archive or just to a random percentage. The Compliance Officer has the ability to also create a severity level for each defined policy. The system will calculate a ‘risk’ factor based on the total number of messages and the policies violated combined with the severity factor. This is displayed to the Compliance Officer in the system overview.