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Travis County has been using Novell GroupWise since the mid-1990s and users have been delighted with it. GroupWise does not automatically save all email. It's designed to allow users to flexibly customize their email storage and archiving. This flexibility means that a centrally imposed technological system to apply retention, enforce policies and search for specific email records does not exist. Some email - probably most of it - is saved by individual users or IT specialists for some period of time, often years, sometimes only hours.
Because the traditional understanding of records management reflected in the existing legal and regulatory framework depends upon applying retention, a brief description of how records managers use that word is important. A retention program establishes and maintains a system to keep important things as long as they should be kept, and its most basic feature is a need to categorize and classify information. This paper-based system was developed when management controlled filing conventions. Almost all records could be categorized by content and assigned a given period of time that Travis County and many other organizations must keep things.
In the electronic mail environment in which we now operate, more than four thousand individuals create and maintain their own email records, and many of them manage these records without significant management control. Operating without a formally adopted email retention policy is a common practice that has been traditional in Travis County. It affords flexibility that allows individual users to work the way they're used to. It maintains the independence of elected officials. If there have been important legal, financial or compliance problems due to operating without a policy, they are not apparent. Only if it is determined that the compliance, cost containment and risk avoidance benefits will justify the adoption of an email retention policy should such a policy be considered.
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