Voicemail and compliance issues

[CBB]

I work for a financial company, and voicemail is a difficult subject for us. We want to purchase a new voicemail system, and of course would like to purchase something that will store the messages in Exchange (modular messaging or Exchange 2007 UM). The reason for this is that it will then be available in Outlook web access, you will see in your blackberry you have a message etc. Our issue however is that quite often we have to do legal discoveries of communications. With email it is very easy to print them off and for them to be scanned through. With voicemail however if the voicemail is discoverable then someone will have to transcribe them. Currently our voicemail is not considered discoverable as they are on a junky old voicemail system. If we put them in Exchange they will be considered discoverable. We are looking at some kind of retention policy for Voicemail in email as a possible solution. Is anyone else having to deal with these types of issues? I would just like to get some kind of idea of what other people are doing.

 

[SWITCHDOG]

Voice mail is discoverable regardless of the age or ability system it resides on. The question is will the Court in question feel it is worth the effort to retreive it?

 

[m4ilm4n]

If you have users pull voicemail messages via their e-mail client (AUDIX allows POP3 access to voicemail), then the voicemails should be covered under existing e-mail retention policies as an attachment. The primary consideration there, though, is that the configuration would have to be standard across all users (you'd have to have everyone set up to pull v/m the same way).

I am in the process of building an e-mail archiving system to handle e-discovery; it's designed to hold 10 to 15 years of messages (the lawyers can't tell me how long I have to keep stuff, and I figure I'll either be dead or retired by the time this thing runs out of space). Let me know if you'd like details.