Overview
In this article we will be outlining our approach to email management, specifically addressing the following topics.
- The Goal of Ingesting Exchange Content into Collabspace
- How to manage exchange content in Collabspace
- Common Destruction Strategies
- What to do with Record-like content
At the end of this article, you should have a good understanding of how to approach email management using Collabspace.
The Goal of Ingesting Exchange Content into Collabspace
Collabspace is a third-party cloud-based system that can be connected to common content creation tools and ingest that content. Exchange is one of the main content sources that Collabspace connects to.
Exchange content, like most other email content, tends to grow steadily. While it is possible for users to manually delete their emails or even set up auto-delete rules, this is not an easy ask for most organizations. Microsoft Purview does offer the ability to create a retention tag that can be applied to all email, however there are drawbacks to this approach as well. The first and most obvious drawback is that you need to have the correct licenses to use Purview for email management. The second drawback is that while the retention tags do provide some flexibility, it does not allow for precise rules targeting metadata on the emails, for example who sent the email or whether it has attachments.
Because of this, one of the main reasons that organizations choose to ingest their Exchange content into Collabspace is for applying retention and destruction rules. Collabspace can assign retention rules to emails in Exchange without the users having to interact with those rules.
However, this is not the only reason to ingest Exchange content. Another main factor is searchability; Collabspace Search is a powerful tool that can search any piece of metadata on an email, including the body of the email as well as the body of any attachments. This can be a helpful tool for regular users who find Exchange search challenging. Collabspace also features the “Discovery Administrator”, a special user type that can search for content across all mailboxes rather than just their own. This is typically used for internal searches to find valuable information, FOI or Personal Information queries, or litigation discoveries.
Finally, Collabspace can provide a secondary digital Archive for Exchange content, where the most critical emails are stored in a separate location away from Exchange. Collabspace can even retain its instance of important emails after the original email has been deleted or a user has left the organization. Collabspace features a high level of security controls to ensure that the email is secure for long-term preservation.
How to manage exchange content in Collabspace
Once you have decided to ingest Exchange content, it is important to identify what your goals are. This will help you determine what content needs to be ingested first, what controls need to be put in place, and whether any change management needs to start for end users.
Collabspace ingests Exchange content by mailbox, and those mailboxes are identified by Azure AD Security Groups. A common strategy is to identify the most critical mailboxes, say the executive teams’, and ingest those mailboxes first. Regardless of how you approach this question, eventually you will be done with connecting and ingesting mailboxes.
Once the content is in Collabspace and the appropriate users have access, it is time to determine the fate of the emails. Will they be preserved permanently as critical content? Will they be transferred to an external Archives? Will you develop blanket rules to auto-delete emails? Or will it be more complex and flexible?
Common Destruction Strategies
First, it is important to recognize that once an email has been ingested into Collabspace, it will not be destroyed until a rule is configured to destroy it, even if the email is deleted in Exchange. Consider content that is in Collabspace “permanent”.
A common retention strategy is to ingest all emails falling under a “Capstone Approach”, i.e. those emails that are most important and must be kept permanently. To execute this, you do not need to do anything.
However, if you go a step further and start crafting rules to delete some content, then it is advised that the Capstone Mailboxes are identified first and locked down to a “Permanent Retention” Policy.
The next strategy is to create automatic deletion rules when an email fulfills a specific set of criteria. The most common is any item that gets into the “Deleted Items” folder of a Mailbox. The second most common is any item whose “Received Date” is older than x years. Remember that the first step is to develop the Capstone Rules, so those emails will not be captured by these rules, since they are already assigned to the Permanent Retention Policy.
Some organizations experience difficulty trying to implement blanket rules such as “All emails will be destroyed 3 years after they were received”. In this situation, it is advised that “tags” are created to allow users to self-manage their own emails. Since Collabspace can use any piece of metadata to identify a type of item, two common approaches are to create Folders in the Mailbox with Retention Periods labeled (3 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc.) or to create Categories that apply the same values.
Capstone Approach
The Capstone approach is very commonly used as a key portion of email management for most Collabspace customers. Essentially, a Capstone approach requires an organization to identify and assign permanent value to emails created and received by specific employees. These people are commonly from the executive team or other high-influence positions.
As implied by the description, the rule used to manage these emails is essentially a rule identifying the user’s mailbox. There is rarely any granularity to this rule, as most capstone approaches treat all emails created by the employees as having high value.
The rule can match to as many Capstone users as needed; the critical portion of the rule is the “Match Any” at the top, specifying that any of these mailboxes fulfills the criteria.
Automatic Deletion
The next most common approach, commonly used hand-in-hand with the Capstone approach, is to simply destroy all emails after they have lived for an extended period of time. As an email ages, its value decreases drastically, since email tends to be used for quick communication rather than for long-term data creation or storage. This is why drawing a line in the sand and destroying all emails that reach a certain age is consider a standard approach to email, even in the records management sphere.
The rule defined to capture these email can be pointed at a specific part of a user’s mailbox (for example, their “Deleted Items” folder) or it can be general and match to all email. The key portion of the rule is the date calculation. The rule below requires the email to be at least 6 years old. Every day Collabspace will evaluate emails and determine if their received date is now 6 years in the past. Note that this also is only capturing either deleted items or items left in the Inbox. This leaves the door open for our third option.
Another technique that falls under automatic deletion is to simply target specific senders. For example, if your organization receives frequent “update” or “news” emails that lose value quickly, the sender can be targeted.
Here’s an example of a Content Rule targeting emails from known addresses or domains. Note that we are still including some kind of delay to ensure we aren’t immediately capturing and potentially destroying emails.
Self-Managed Email
Allowing users to manage their own email can be a daunting prospect for many organizations. Users undervalue the importance of records management principles like data quality and volume management. However, it can be used in combination with the previously mentioned techniques as an option for those users who balk at the idea of their emails being automatically destroyed.
Exchange offers a few different ways to identify content, the two most common being moving the email to a custom folder or “categorizing” the email using custom tags. Both of these methods can be leveraged by Collabspace, so it is up to the users how they want to manage it.
The basic idea is to agree to terms that are used; for example, Folders must be named “Long Term Retention” or “Important Emails”, something that is descriptive enough both to be identified by a Collabspace rule, but also enough to properly identify the email as high value.
It is generally advised that a received date is at least evaluated, to ensure that nothing is being captured too early. Giving your users time to decide as well as time to forget about the email can be
helpful.
Remember that the rules are simply there to “capture” the email. After it is captured, the retention
period can be as long as needed by the Collabspace Retention Workflow.
What to do with the Records?
The final question is what’s to be done with actual record content. Well, that depends on corporate policy. Can official records, essentially those emails that can be identified as containing record value matching a known record category, be stored in Exchange? If the answer is yes, then some method of categorizing the emails must be built for the users. Most methods must be applied by the end user, which can easily be fulfilled by the section before this, using some kind of agreed-upon folder title or category tag.
However, in the end, the most effective method that we have seen is to simply have the user move the email somewhere else, preferably your system of record where the email can be easily identified by its category. This is considered the cleanest method for two main reasons: first, it does not allow records to be stored in email. Adopting this position as an organization and implementing automatic email clean-up rules imposes a restriction on users and how they use their email. Second, it pushes the email into a system that features better information architecture tools; typically, SharePoint or some other document storage system that offers metadata. Email management is difficult because it is essentially unstructured data; putting email records into a structured system reduces that difficulty immediately.
Wrapping Up
Collabspace is an excellent tool to manage email content and support email retention, eDiscovery and mailbox size management. A thoughtful policy on capstone email management and emails as records helps drive the business case for email management.
One size does not fit all. Choose the techniques best aligned with the objectives and culture of your organization.
If you decide to move forward with email managed in Collabspace, at the end you will have achieved:
- Email management compliance with regulator or legislative requirements
- Efficient mailbox size management and potential cost savings
- Faster FOI responses because of the robust email discovery tools in Collabspace
