We are currently wrapping up a major survey on unified communications (UC).  One of the survey respondents, who works for a government agency in Florida, had some interesting comments on UC and archiving from his perspective as an experienced IT person charged with managing messaging infrastructure:

"We have Florida Statute 119 the "Sunshine Law".  Although email, IM [and other electronic communication] should be treated like paper communications, in actuality, we end up keeping all electronic stuff forever.  Our storage has spun out of control.  Because it is so easy for the user to keep it they do.

Unified Communications would force us to keep all the faxes, voicemails, IMs, as well as our more than seven million emails we currently have and can't get rid of.  Management of that data and, more importantly, the searching of that data is a deal breaker for us.

Archiving technology actually increases the burden.  The easier it is and the more [users] want it and the less they try to manage their email, files, etc, based on the parameters of Florida law.  Why clean up my email when you are going to keep it all for me?  Then, when something comes up, they all turn to IT.  Our legal team looks at a "keep everything" approach simply because of the ease.  They don't take into consideration the cost and management of all the data.

Because our rules are not based on age, but first on the type of content THEN age, each message (or other object) must be evaluated individually.  IT can't read something to determine how that one email should be handled and no one else wants to spend the time to do it either.

With that in mind, most people in the local government sector in Florida are not attracted to UC in their shops.  There isn't a tool in place to make it work easily.  About the only think I can think of is forcing retention stamping as soon as it is accessed - a disposition code must be added to every single item so it can systematically be purged or retained."

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this individual's experience:

· First, deletion policies are just as important as retention policies, since content that is no longer needed but kept anyway adds to the cost of storage, adds to the legal and regulatory liabilities faced by an organization, makes search more time-consuming and expensive, etc. Far fewer organizations have deletion policies than retention policies.

· Second, in the absence of good deletion policies and overall good storage management practices, UC will face an uphill battle in many organizations.  If IT administrators are given the option of simply adding to their storage management burden by adding UC to the mix, few will be receptive to the idea.

Many thanks to the individual who provided his insightful comments and experience.

OR Commentary for Messaging Wire 

Week of August 30, 2010