Bizcom’s hosted email archiving addresses e-discovery requirements
By Allan Maurer
RALEIGH, NC –Bizcom Web Services Inc. launched its hosted email archiving library service this week to help small to medium-sized businesses comply with legal and industry requirements while lowering in-house management costs. The company, which is raising a private placement, its first outside money, has steadily evolved its hosting and custom application development services.
On the heels of the Electronic Message Preservation Act, which passed the U.S. House earlier this month, Bizcom sees a pressing need for its new hosted email archiving library.
The 13-person company is in the midst of raising its first private placement after being self-funded, says Bizcom president Mark Wiener.
Hiring aggressively
Bizcom is hiring dot net programmers and sales people, he says.
About the new product, Wiener says, “Many industries are now required to keep non-editable copies of most every email or attached document they receive or send.
“Our hosted Email Archiving Library is designed to help businesses and government agencies safeguard their important legal documents and comply with e-discovery and records retention policies, particularly those mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and Federal Rules for Civil Procedures.”
The service, available starting at $14 a month as an add-on to the company’s Microsoft Hosted Exchange Service, also provides comprehensive management and control and search and retrieval capabilities.
More than just archiving
Wiener tells TechJournal South that archiving email to meet government and industry requirements is a bit more complex than just storing the data. “Over 2,000 rules and regulations say you’re supposed to retain your documents.”
Email defined as a carrier of a message is “no different than sending a letter,” he points out. “You need to retain it for whatever time required.”
You need it in case of a lawsuit, for business continuity purposes, and to bring new people up to speed quickly on projects, Wiener says.
It can be very important in defending something such as a sexual harassment case by establishing who started a relationship or establish what actual risks are because you have all the data, he notes.
Bizcom’s service also provides ways to mark emails (destruction indexing) that should be deleted after a certain time.
Keeping email too long also risky
It will also tag emails that represent attorney-client privileged communications and are not subject to discovery, or as intellectual property.
Also, Wiener says, “Retention of documents longer than you actually need them is almost as risky as not having them at all.”
He points to the case where the LA Times sued the LA Police Department when it only delivered three years worth of documents on the Rodney King case for a story it was doing on progress since then.
The LA Times said we understand you keep the documents 14 years.
The police department said its retention policy only covered three years. The court ruled that they had to make all 14 years of documents available and most of the damaging material in the resulting story came from those.
Another problem the new service addresses is that using back-up tapes as a principal method of archiving can result in missing some documents and having many duplicates of others.
“Our archiving occurs at the transactional level,” says Wiener. “It occurs as it comes in and as it goes out as opposed to daily or every Monday at 2 a.m. on tapes.”
Another new service also launched
It also has the capability to alert management when documents are being examined by say the technology staff, showing exactly what they’re looking at. “It puts checks and balances into the system,” Wiener says.
Also, today, Bizcom introduced its Hosted Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 service.
Offered as an add-on to BizCom’s Hosted Exchange Service, this combination of advanced communications functionality and outsourced management gives small- to medium-sized businesses the ability to implement a fully unified, enterprise-class communications platform for minimal cost.
On the Web: www.bizcomweb.com
© 2008, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
