Resources > White Papers > Integrated Archiving for IBM Lotus Sametime Chats and IBM Lotus Notes Email
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Abstract
This technical brief begins by describing the drivers behind
instant message (IM) archiving and the links between IM and email archiving; it
then illustrates how Instant IMtegrity Archives for IBM Lotus Sametime can be
integrated with EMC EmailXtender for IBM Lotus Notes.
Archiving Electronic Communications
The requirements for email archiving are
well-established: Regulatory compliance,
discovery requirements, and mailbox capacity management issues have prompted a
growing majority of organizations of all sizes across all sectors to deploy an
email archiving solution.
IM chats, on the other hand, have historically presented
regulatory bodies, courts, and enterprises with a difficult question: Are they conversation? Or are they communication?
As IM becomes ubiquitous as a key communications medium, IM
conversations join email as valuable digital assets—but only if they are
preserved and (even more importantly) easily retrievable and searchable.
Many regulatory bodies (particularly the SEC and the NASD)
now view IM as a form of communication that is subject to regulatory compliance
requirements. In March 2003, for
example, the NYSE issued a memo stating that SEC Rule 17a-4 requires the
archiving of both e-mail and IMs.
Further, enterprises must be prepared for the possibility
that litigants will subject IM conversations to legal discovery. On December 1, 2006, revisions to the Federal
Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) came into effect. Rule 26 in particular governs the production
of ‘electronic stored evidence’ (ESI) in federal court cases. ESI covers any and all information that can
be stored electronically—including instant messaging conversations.
Important business discussions take place over IM: Decisions are made, contracts are negotiated,
and transactions are completed. No one
would ever dream of deleting every email immediately after reading them or
replying to them; rather, users carefully file emails so they can refer to them
in the future. IM conversations, just
like email, contain important business intelligence that must also be treated
as a valuable digital asset.
Integrated Email and IM Archiving
Efficiency, transparency, and full oversight are just a few
reasons prompting a growing number of organizations to integrate their IM and
email archives into a single repository against which they can conduct unified
search and discovery operations.
The diagram below illustrates the
integration between Instant IMtegrity Archives from Instant Technologies and
EmailXtender from EMC.
IMtegrity is a highly-scalable, enterprise-class solution
for secure logging and archiving of both IBM Lotus Sametime chats. IMtegrity is specifically designed and
natively built for Lotus Sametime. It
leverages an open and extensible Lotus Notes/Domino database, thereby making it
very easy to it with any Lotus Notes email archiving solution.
In this specific illustration, IMtegrity is integrated with
EmailXtender via an agent within the IMtegrity database that converts the
Sametime chat logs into an email format at preset intervals. A connector into EmailXtender’s journal
database then writes those emails into the EmailXtender archive according to
defined archiving policies for in-scope users.
The result is a seamless integrated repository of all IM
chats and emails.
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