Last week, I had the privilege of speaking to and participating on a panel at the MER (Managing Electronic Records) Conference in Chicago. The annual event hosted by Cohasset Associates, now in its 15th year, had about 500 attendees. A number of vendors exhibited at the conference, including IBM, EMC, Iron Mountain, Open Text, Orchestria, Access Sciences and a number of other leading firms in the document and records management space.

E-mail archiving (Compare Message Archiving products) and e-discovery occupied a prominent role at the conference, with at least 23 individual sessions focused on these issues. What was somewhat surprising, however, is that in informal polls among the large audiences at a couple of the sessions was the dearth of e-mail archiving in use. A show of hands at one session focused on e-mail archiving practices, for example, revealed that no more than about 5% of the audience had deployed e-mail archiving. This points out a couple of important issues related to the practice of retaining e-mails:

• First, e-mail archiving is still a controversial issue in many organizations. One attendee, for example, noted that he has been trying for years to get his company to implement e-mail archiving, but he has not been successful in persuading them to do so. Many organizations view sound records management as critically important, but have a lower view of e-mail archiving, despite the fact that a large proportion of most company’s records are stored in e-mail – this will become even more true with the growth of unified communications and unified messaging.

• Second, e-mail archiving is partly about technology, but mostly about policy. Getting your arms around retention schedules, deletion schedules, the thousands of regulations that require records retention, and the growing number of legal precedents focused on retaining content and rules of evidence is not an easy task. It requires a great deal of consideration, some good planning and continual monitoring to make sure you’re staying current with all of your obligations.

If you’re looking for a good conference on e-mail archiving, records management, e-discovery and related issues, I would highly recommend this conference – it will be worth your time.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.