A thread was started internally with our local Information Worker team (Johann Kruse, Mario D’Silva, John Hodgson, Ian Palangio, Andrew Lowson and myself) discussion compliance and more specifically how Exchange 2007 and MOSS work together.

One of my colleagues, Andrew Lowson (Solution Specialist for Portals & Collaboration, based out of Melbourne) came up with a great response:

My view on this is a classic Better Together story, Compliance is so much more than just documents or email, it should be a holistic all encompassing solution that controls all electronic and non electronic records. So we can only affect some of the solution as it is a policy and process change.

With that said Exchange and SharePoint bring some very impressive tools to the table such as:

·         Ability to capture messages between internal and external parties and between internal parties through the use of server side rules.

·         Copy all messages to a central record store, and to journal emails in transit.  

·         The ability for and administrator to search all email across accounts centrally to discover content (never used to be able to do this).

·         Enforce Chinese walls within organisations, important in FSI.

·         Remove the ability to have PST folders.

·         Enforce retention limits on users.

·         Allow users to easily promote emails as records and enforce policy through AD.

·         Create one or more centrally managed record repositories to handle electronic and physical records as well as all email communication.

·         The ability to expire content and define what action should take place once that content has expired.

·         Easily promote documents as records and capture all their meta-data including versions, audit trail etc.

·         Legal holds.

Well I might have missed some but that is the general gist.

If anyone else has any commentary on this I’d love to see it.

BTW – Andrew Lowson would have put this on his blog but he hasn’t set one up yet - this is just a guest appearance/cameo.