Well, I finally made it to the AIIM Communities and I'm excited to be able to regularly share with you my thoughts, suggestions and comments. I've been in the archiving space for almost a decade now and during that tenure have been on all sides of the table so to say. From implementing, troubleshooting, designing and using archiving solutions as an end user myself I have seen things go well and wrong.
Archiving doesn't have to be painful, but it does require homework as an organization. Since there are more than 100 vendors (last time I counted), to choose from there is a huge difference between the functionality offered from each vendor. From my experience every organization is different and has different expectations and needs/desires.
Archiving doesn't solve everything and also can't do everything that people expect it to do. You often can't take the same approach as you for instance did using physical paper records to the digital world. I often see organizations struggle with content classification and retention policies and my 2 cents are that you should keep it simple. The more complex your policies are, the more complex they are to maintain and explain to your end users.
Also .. I'm personally not really a fan of end user classification of email. Users have a job to do and if someone sends / receives a few hundred emails a day .. it will be nearly impossible for them to actually classify all the emails they send, whilst actually fulfilling their daily duties. In my next post I'll go into what I think is a suitable policy that I've seen functioning in many organizations.
#E-mail #ElectronicRecordsManagement #archiving #retention