ECM Briefs

This week Open Text announced a partnership with FaceTime Communications, one of the premier providers of solutions to enable safe and productive use of instant messaging and social media tools. You can read about the news here.

To follow up on this announcement, I thought it would be helpful to look at some of the records management considerations surrounding IM and social media. While companies see these tools as an effective way to increase productivity – especially among younger members of the workforce raised on MySpace and Facebook – they are also struggling to understand and manage risk, especially around content retention.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a clear trend toward courts and other governing bodies becoming more and more demanding when it comes to electronic information. There’s even a case pending where content stored in memory that has yet to be written to disk is required to be produced as a record. As for peer-to-peer and other greynets, the situation is wild and wooly at the moment because there are no clear legal precedents that govern retention requirements, liability for employee postings and so forth.

Here are few areas that enterprise should consider when it comes to these new forms of communications:

• Is the communication internal or external facing? The requirements for retaining and managing internal communications vs. external are likely to be much different. Note that external communications includes password-protected sites used by customers and partners.


• Do you have a policy governing the use of social media sites? An important first step before you can begin to implement records management and archiving software solutions is to have agreed upon policies in place. For sites like Facebook, do your policies clearly state what is appropriate behavior and what is not? For example, sharing of music files is something that may be permissible at home but is clearly outside the context of a standard business practice.


• Do you have adequate oversight? Although you may be tempted to shut down access to many social networks and peer -to-peer sites, these can also be useful business tools. If you allow them, software tools are available to help ensure company policies are being followed.

Most companies already have implemented programs around managing email, and many of the same rules apply to social media tools. But even with email, the rules and best practices are still evolving. One thing is for certain, these tools are here to stay – and so are many of the questions.