Policy Management Overview

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.