Paul,
Perhaps you have touched on a deeper problem faced by those implementing
EDRMS in a changing regulatory environment; one that I don't yet feel is
fully addressed by the available solutions.
By putting the e-mail into the EDRMS you declare it as a record. However,
some of the e-mails that are not declared will be records, and in some
situations/organisations all of the e-mails will be records (with varying
retention periods/rules).
I.T. depts will want you to get e-mails out of the e-mail application to
decrease the load on their servers. They may have an e-mail management
solution that takes the emails out of the application, leaving a pointer to
an "archive"; this allows them to remove duplication etc. while making it
easier to meet requirements for legal discovery. They may have a
"journaling" application that copies all emails (or only all to/from
particular recipients) into a repository for legal discovery purposes. It
may be that neither of these types of application will allow retention
schedules to be applied to records within them. Also, the back-ups for these
will need to be addressed too, after all if an email is legitimately deleted
it should not be recoverable for ever and a day just because I.T. haven't
the technology to deliver this functionality.
The RM community may be left playing catch-up by:
- Not having a handle on the e-mails that are outside the EDRMS
system.
- Not influencing the I.T. infrastructure of the organisation.
Does anyone know of a case in the U.K. in which an organisation has faced
discovery when they thought that having declared emails in an EDRMS had got
them covered?
Keith Simmons
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