Retaining Critical Email for Public Records
Novell Cool Solutions: Tip
By Lindsey Johnstone
|
Digg This -
Slashdot This
Posted: 18 Dec 2001 |
Tina R. set this one up beautifully. Basically, she's looking for a way for her County Commissioners to save some of their e-mails for public record purposes. We, naturally, turned to our records retention expert (and Advisory Board member) Lindsey Johnstone for a solution.
The Problem
We currently have a GroupWise issue that we need clarification on. We use GroupWise 5.5.4 for our local county government's e-mail system. To satisfy the current laws regarding public records, we have added a Public Record mailbox for employees to CC or forward e-mails to. This is done on a voluntary basis. This is the only mailbox that we have set up public access to via a kiosk machine.
Our County Commissioners are looking for a mechanism, maybe a global rule, that can automatically send a copy of e-mails from everyone's mailboxes to the Public Record mailbox, but allow users to de-select the copy option in case the E-mail contains employee sensitive information. We have tried forwarding rules, but disabling and enabling rules on an e-mail-by-e-mail basis is quite cumbersome. Do you have any other ideas?
The Solution
There are quite a number of ways to accomplish the goal of capturing any and all e-mails. Unfortunately, though, none of them are native to GroupWise. With the use of third-party applications, one can archive, capture, export or convert e-mails for later use or referral. As to the ability to turn off and on, that functionality currently doesn't exist, though with a shared folder set aside to "capture" the e-mail information, it would be to the users' discretion whether it is retained or not.
I have been using products from Nexic (http://www.nexic.com) that help enable the user to "make the choice", or there is Guinevere (http://www.gwava.com/products/guinevere_overview.html) that does it at the Internet Agent level and captures any and all external e-mail automatically.
Novell Cool Solutions (corporate web communities) are produced by WebWise Solutions. www.webwiseone.com