Get Connected - Fall 2007 - (Page 8)

E-mail Archiving: Is No Longer a Good Defense “Oops” Due to the ever-widening reliance upon electronic data in lieu of paper files, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)—the rules governing civil procedure in U.S. federal courts—were amended in December of 2006 to require organizations to preserve and be able to produce electronically stored communications and information relevant to any issue before the federal court. All organizations, including school and libraries, must have a stated retention policy and the ability to fulfill that policy in order to be compliant with these guidelines. Additionally, it is incumbent upon the school or library to continue archiving electronic communications even after the normal period of the retention policy in the face of actual or pending litigation. In response to today’s techno-realities, organizations of all kinds are bound both by law and prudence to rethink their storage and retrieval policies. Or, as attorney Chuck Cagle of Lewis, King, Krieg & Waldrop, P. C., the law firm that represents the Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents, sums the issue up: “The law is clear. ‘Oops’ is not a good defense.” Thankfully, ENA can help. When the amendments were approved by the Supreme Court and submitted to Congress, ENA began investigating possible vendors with which to partner in order to provide an e-mail archiving solution to the company’s customers. One of the companies reviewed was an obvious candidate: Gaggle, the partner that provides the secure student e-mail system for schools. ENA Introduces Gaggle E-mail Archiving Services Key features and benefits of Gaggle E-mail Archiving Services include: • Automatic Archiving of Every Message Sent and Received by Your E-mail Users • Advanced, Secure On-line Search and Discovery • Compatibility With Most Widely Used E-mail Platforms • Hassle-free Set-up and Support • A Cost-effective, Reliable Solution Another successful ENA-Gaggle partnership “We looked at a lot of vendors,” says ENA Product Architect Simon Weller, “but the price for almost all of them was too prohibitive for schools. With Gaggle, we get a great product from a trusted partner. The Gaggle archiving solution will support Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, First Class and GroupWise mail service platforms in addition to ENA Mail. The way we and Gaggle have set the solution up, we’ve made e-mail archiving simple. The burden of e-mail archiving—which can be quite significant—is totally eliminated. Doing it yourself could prove difficult School districts may choose to bring e-mail archiving in-house and have their IT department manually offload e-mails from their e-mail server and archive. However, school districts may realize—as many have, unfortunately—that the process is time-consuming, could cause normally reliable e-mail systems to crash and may require a pricey investment into disc storage space to retain the e-mails of hundreds of accounts for multiple years. And that’s just the retention part of it. Oftentimes it’s the search and discovery of specific e-mails that really bedevils an IT department. As Greg Onorato, network manager for Shrewsbury Public Schools, a K-12 system in Massachusetts, told SearchStorageChannel.com recently after his district’s frustrating experience storing and searching e-mails themselves: “The time that could potentially be lost retrieving that (information) would be astronomical.” Added Bob Cornacchioli, Shrewbury’s director of instructional technology and media services, “That’s when we said … we can’t be dealing with this on a manual basis.” The benefits of a managed storage provider Why should schools and libraries consider an archiving solution? • The Potential Risks of Non-compliance Schools and libraries that have been found to be non-compliant with federal rules for the archiving and retrieval of electronic communications can, and have been, subject to substantial fines for their inability to produce subpoenaed communications. • The Burden Is Upon the School or Library to Produce the Documents Recent rulings have demonstrated that organizations bear the sole responsibility for providing archived e-mail. If they cannot be produced, courts can assume that the content of the e-mail was relevant or damaging, undermining the organization’s legal position. With a hosted solution such as the Gaggle system, archiving is automatic and searching the archive is a snap. “With our solution,” 8 http://www.SearchStorageChannel.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Get Connected - Fall 2007

Get Connected - Fall 2007 NSBA Social Networking Study A Letter From the President Network Services for Libraries 25th Annual TETC Conference Partnership for 21st Century Skills E-mail Archiving Social Networking 101 Ramp Up for E-Rate Season News From HECC Notes From the CTO

Get Connected - Fall 2007

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