In 2012, President Obama issued a command for “Building a 21st Century Digital Government,” requiring the use of online and mobile tools to make government services easier to use. Since then, thousands of agencies have been using web and social media tools to achieve the goal of “transparent, participatory, collaborative government”. This is great for creating an open and communicative culture and trust for government, but how do you comply with eDiscovery requests while publishing so much volume on social media?
(Please note: The information presented in this article is not legal advice. It is meant for educational and planning purposes only. Please consult with your legal counsel for any issues related to email retention laws.)
Archiving email, if not done without advanced technology, requires a tremendous amount of time and resources for businesses. While archiving email is time-consuming, it’s necessary because of federal, state and industry email retention laws.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives citizens the right to access information from government funded agencies. As a part of this law, government organizations are required to archive their emails and agency related social media accounts.
FOIA requests, though few and far between can be a piece of cake, or a HUGE legal headache. When someone does request records, agencies must produce, or face costly legal battles. Governments therefore look for an easy to search system with quick support if anything does happen to go wrong.
It’s unavoidable – at some point you will more than likely “move to the cloud”. A McKinsey study showed that in 2015, 77% of enterprises used traditionally built IT infrastructure as the primary environment for at least one workload; they predict that this will drop to 43% by 2018. But just because McKinsey says other people are doing it, does that mean you should too? And if you decide that answer is yes how do you personalize it to fit your companies’ unique goals?
This question has come up more than once so I thought I would put up some thoughts on the topic. The short answer is that for most cases, organizations should take advantage of shared mailboxes—especially in Office 365/Exchange Online.
What are shared mailboxes?
“Friends don’t let friends build data centers”
Let me clarify, if you work for actual data centers and you provide the services, you’re the exception. I’m talking about us SMBs, why do we even need to manage actual rows and racks of servers? Even pinpointing down to Exchange as an example, why do we really need to have an on-prem Exchange server?
I had to eat my words in an argument today. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit. I have been telling my colleagues that I am not excited about going to Office 365 because it’s just another web documents service. I hate Google docs. I can’t cut and paste the way I’m used to. All my keyboard shortcuts don’t work. Are you kidding me!!! The only way we’re surviving as a small business is because of my absolute efficiency with Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint.
As we zoom towards December, I have no doubt my children and family members will ask Father Christmas for some popular digital device. For good or bad, we live in a world where electronic devices outnumber people. We create more data and information than we could possibly consume.
I know what you're thinking - another bloody review of Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365! You're right, it is, but with a slight twist. I've had the experience of using both, in a sales role, and using them on different devices from different places. It wasn't an assignment review and I certainly wasn't asked for any feedback on the systems. I suppose that's the beauty of blogging - I can give an opinionated comparison from the user standpoint - and not a particularly technical user at that.