Today’s post comes from Norv Leong, Director of Product Marketing at Actiance.
Having just returned from the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat in lovely Monterey, California (author John Steinbeck’s stomping grounds), I walked away with the distinct impression that social media and enterprise collaboration applications were drawing increasingly more attention, both from the courts as well as the other vendors in attendance.
Why is this happening? Well, there’s growing acceptance that social-type communications are subject to eDiscovery just like other forms of electronic communication (read: email). The list of cases involving social media eDiscovery grows longer each month. All this reflects the growing demand for solutions that can capture social media and collaboration content in a way that preserves the interactive format of sites like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and their brethren.
Capturing social content is one thing but to do so contextually is another. The importance of context can’t be emphasized enough when it comes to social media and collaboration platforms. That’s because their very DNA is predicated on constant interaction, be it feedback, replies, sharing, you name it. You might have ten individuals responding one on top of the other to a provocative blog entry. If an archiving system were to capture each of the ten persons’ comments individually without tying them back to the original blog entry, you lose all context.
Now, when you toss litigation into the mix, where expensive legal costs and tight deadlines are the norm, well, you can see how having accurate, contextual capture can save lots of time, money, and headaches. Moreover, having a system in place that can handle a wide range of communications (e.g., instant messages, social media, collaboration, Skype, BlackBerry, and all the rest) brings efficiencies that would otherwise be absent if an organization chose to deploy multiple systems to capture all these different types of communication channels.
Point solutions are becoming too difficult to manage, too expensive, and prone to compatibility issues. Having a single platform to manage all your communications channels, given all your security and compliance concerns, can certainly restore calm to an otherwise chaotic world of real-time communications.
That kind of simplicity even John Steinbeck would be proud.
