Lava Systems Africa, an affinity partner of Canadian-based Open Text, and one of the companies within the Enterprise Content & Wireless (ECW) Group, today announced that the latter had extended its lead in records management, with new offerings designed to help organisations better manage content created in real-time communications applications such as instant messaging (IM), as well as incorporate the content into records management and compliance initiatives.
Offered in partnership with FaceTime Communications, these solutions broaden Open Text offerings for enterprise records management to encompass all types of electronic communication.
Companies in all industries, as well as government agencies, are faced with the daunting task of monitoring and managing legal and compliance risks associated with rapidly proliferating forms of electronic communications that now include corporate intranet-based e-mail, Internet e-mail systems such as Hotmail, various forms of Web-based communications, such as IM and Skype, as well as Web 2.0 social networking sites such as MySpace, blogs and Twitter.
Most organisations are still working through the best way to balance the productivity benefits of social networks and instant messaging with the potential for risk to the enterprise. IM conversations can be subject to discovery just like business documents and therefore must be managed throughout their life cycle. Open Text and FaceTime have released a podcast that explores these challenges companies face.
Open Text and FaceTime provide organisations with the ability to manage electronic communications currently in use and new forms that are likely to emerge in the coming years. With FaceTime, enterprises gain a powerful tool for securing, managing and monitoring public IM and enterprise IM such as Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) and IBM Lotus Sametime, as well as protecting against other greynets that can potentially open the door to hackers and malware.
This capability, integrated with Open Text`s Livelink ECM, allows customers to selectively retain, archive and destroy IM conversations in order to meet compliance and eDiscovery requirements.
"Open Text is once again leading the market in innovation. In partnership with FaceTime, we can now enable customers to enforce a consistent, centralised policy across all environments, including IM and e-mail," commented Peter Lipps, Vice-President and General Manager of Enterprise Records Management Business at Open Text. "This helps companies minimise the cost and complexity of storing electronic content for legal and business purposes and offers the protection necessary for favourable outcomes in the event of litigation or audits."
FaceTime commands the longest track record of any vendor in the IM and greynet security market and, according to industry analyst International Data Corp, has led the IM management vendor segment in market share in each of the past three years. The company has more than 900 customers (including nine of the top 10 US banks) spanning nearly 2.5 million seats.
"End-users continue to take business communications into their own hands, downloading and using real-time collaborative applications, often without a complete understanding of the risks," added Frank Cabri, Vice-President of Marketing and Product Management for FaceTime.
"The challenge is finding the right balance between enabling employee use of these applications while minimising risk to the enterprise. This is best achieved in the context of broader enterprise compliance and security initiatives. We believe our collaboration with Open Text gives us the ability to deliver on that promise."
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