Records Retention in a GroupWise Environment - A Follow Up

Novell Cool Solutions: Feature
By Lindsey Johnstone

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Posted: 26 Sep 2002

Records Retention in a GroupWise Environment - A follow up

At BrainShare 2002, I presented a session on this subject. It was felt at the time that there was an increasing demand for the "User's Collaboration Product", with it's inherent protections for the user's individual security to "open up" to meet the increasing business demand for an open records system. Several government concerns and private businesses are under increasing pressure to "show on demand" certain kinds of electronic communications for public scrutiny, as evidenced in the dramatic increase in the Novell Support Forums of requests that GroupWise provide this kind of access.

In my session, I presented some of the challenges and the strategies to meet those challenges. What I wasn't able to do at the time was discuss viable solutions, though I did intimate that there were solutions on the horizon. This article will lay out some of the progress made since last March.

The Goal -
A completely invisible to the end user, comprehensive mechanism to record all e-mails, both external and internal, with message flow tracking contained in a database environment that would allow for extensive subject and message text searching and filtering. Additionally, provide a method of extraction that would be readily accessible and allow for Internet access of the records.

Are we there yet? -
Not completely, but there has been some dramatic progress made.
One product, GMB Software's GEM (http://www.gmb.com.au/Products/gem.htm) comes terribly close with their current release to answering the stated goal. In talking with their representatives, the next release will answer almost all of the stated goals, plus GEM provides an additional feature of message analysis for both incoming and outgoing e-mails.

Other developments -
Guinevere2, available now from http://www.gwava.com/ has added archiving capabilities and an Archive viewer for those do not have the requirement for system wide message tracking and retention.

GW-CSU GroupWise Common Signature Update from Omni Technology Solutions (http://www.omni-ts.com/download_GWCSD.html) will soon be available to provide a similar archiving solution.

Is that all there is? -
For the moment, yes. But by BrainShare 2003, I hope to present several products from some well-known GroupWise solution providers that will answer the stated goal.

Mr. Lindsey Johnstone

Lindsey Johnstone is a CoolSolutions Dot Com Advisory Board Member and is also a Novell Support Connection System Operator (SysOp) working the GroupWise forums and is known to be gooshy about Record Retentions.