One of the most striking realities of the wired world is the reams of e-mail, where some companies, executives and yes, even journalists, regularly receive hundreds each day.

So what happens if your business is obligated by law to keep e-mails to comply with corporate governance or litigation standards?

The answer, experts agree, lies in e-mail archiving.

E-mail archiving is a quick, easy and relatively painless way to keep all your internal and external communications on hand for as long as conceivably possible. An e-mail archiving company or product will zip hundreds of thousands, even millions of messages, into an easily-accessible file.

The OBJ spoke to two e-mail archiving companies, Zantaz and Fortiva, on how they help smaller businesses virtually sort, stack, and pack away their messages, as well as Art Richmond, manager of information systems for Mosaid Technologies, and a regular user of archiving services.

OBJ: How often do you employ e-mail archiving in order to help your business?

RICHMOND: Because one of the aspects of Mosaid's business is that we're often in court for litigation, we're required to maintain archives of every single e-mail that's sent and received. Because it may be required someday in court. We've been using Lotus Notes for about five years, and the reason we switched to Lotus Notes for e-mail was its ability to archive e-mail.

OBJ: How long do you keep e-mail messages on hand, then?

RICHMOND: The rules are kind of sketchy – in days gone by, you were only required to keep it as long as was reasonable, and you were supposed to determine that yourself. Most people preserved them for around seven years, because that's how long the media would last. So if you backed up your e-mails to tape, for instance, that's how long the media would last and that's what was acceptable.

As soon as you get into litigation, the courts have sort of strengthened that requirement, and have penalized companies for not keeping their e-mail around. In one of the cases that Mossaid was involved with, there was a ruling against the company that we were in court with, because they destroyed their e-mails. And they were penalized by the judge that was hearing the case. We intend to keep our e-mail forever.

OBJ: Would you recommend this type of practice from an organization standpoint, even if the company isn't required to keep e-mails?

RICHMOND: For a technology company, absolutely. One of the things that's coming to light with technology companies is the need to patent your inventions and protect those patents in court, and if you haven't archived those e-mails you don't have any evidence trail of when you developed the invention. So those are very useful for things like that.

Other companies may need to do it for corporate governance. If ever your corporate controls were called into question, then perhaps e-mail might become evidence about that, so e-mails can become supporting evidence. But that really hasn't played out yet – there's more to come, because most companies in Canada aren't required to be compliant and such legislation in Canada isn't in place yet. We're just starting that process. We're just a small company, and we're not required to become compliant until 2008 or 2009.

OBJ: Do you see the legislation on e-mail compliance as evolving over the past few years, and will all companies soon be required to be compliant?

RICHMOND: There's legislation that's been passed right now that requires even small companies like Mosaid to not only have corporate controls, but to be able to prove their corporate controls are in place, they're well tested, and they're effective. So integration of e-mail into corporate controls is going to be important, and archiving of e-mail would then provide the evidence that your corporate controls are in place or not.

THE EXPERTS SAY

The nature of e-mail archiving serves very different purposes depending on how large an organization you are, and the challenges that you face.

E-mail archiving fundamentally started as an activity around regulatory compliance, so a lot of industries have regulations on how long different classes of information needs to be maintained. And with something in the order of 70 per cent of business critical information traveling through e-mail, and often that information solely exists on e-mail because people don't print things out, having that information maintained and organized becomes critical if you need to go back after the fact and say – "This is what we agreed to, here are the contract negotiations that led us to this point."

And typically what we're finding is that people don't have a good handle on what's a final version of a document, so having the history of the communication that led to that final document is just as relevant when you're faced with a dispute, or when you're arguing with someone else about what you agreed to.

So in this sense, it's very useful to see not only the end result, but the lead up to it.

It used to be that e-mail was primarily used by larger corporations for business purposes, and small businesses used it mainly for personal correspondence. But more and more, you're faced with having to deal with business correspondence in e-mail, and that means staying on top of it and being able to find, potentially, a year's worth of e-mail if there's a dispute.

Rick Dales, VP of product management, Fortiva

In the current corporate environment, with its increasing regulatory scrutiny of corporate behaviour, companies of all sizes in all industries are recognizing the need for the solutions that Zantaz provides. As a result, the e-mail and file archiving market has grown dramatically over the last five years.

With a comprehensive set of solutions offering both on-site and on demand options for the capture, preservation, access, review and production of critical corporate information, e-mail archiving services create tangible benefits for customers in the immediate and long term.

By optimizing the storage of e-mail messages and files, e-mail archiving generates dramatic cost savings and productivity increases that provide rapid and compelling return on investment. A scalable archive, whether created on site or hosted in an offsite data centre, offers secure retention and disposition management to enable compliance with industry regulations and corporate policies pertaining to the handling of information. Our company offers a suite of business-focused applications for compliance officers and legal professionals to leverage the archived information for proactive supervision, discovery, review, evidentiary preparation and production.

With these sophisticated and feature-rich applications, organizations can effectively eliminate the risk of regulatory fines and legal penalties related to the mismanagement of corporate information.

Stephen King, President and CEO, Zantaz