Professional SharePoint® 2007 Records Management Development: Managing Official Records with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

Chapter 14. Managing Electronic Mail Records

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of how MOSS is set up to handle e-mail records. If we're talking about Office SharePoint Server 2007 and e-mail, then we have to include Exchange 2007 in the discussion because of the tight integration it provides. It turns out that Exchange 2007 is designed to work in tandem with MOSS to provide end-to-end "content life-cycle" support that includes Messaging Records Management (MRM). MRM is an additional layer within Exchange 2007 that seeks to simplify the process of staying in compliance with company policy, government regulations, or other requirements.

E-mail comprises the majority of enterprise content, much of which is directly related to official communications that become part of the official record and history related to particular business activities. It's not difficult to imagine scenarios in which e-mails must be treated as something more than simply transient messages. For example, an e-mail message can have attachments. If the message is to be treated as an official record, then its attachments would also need to be included in the Records Management strategy.

Failure to develop an effective system for managing e-mail records can have serious financial and personal consequences, as shown by often cited court cases such as Murphy Oil v. Fluor Daniel (2002), United States v. Philip Morris (2004), and CIBC World Markets v. Genuity Capital Markets (Canada, 2005).

In the Murphy ...