Businesses are facing increasing compliance demands regarding the retrieval of corporate communications. While standard archiving procedures can save and index most electronic documents, including email, for the purposes of discovery, voice mail has only recently come under the mandate of retention. In a recent case, a judge ordered a company to ‘turn off’ its voice mail system until it could demonstrate it could effectively archive and retrieve its voice mail communications. More companies will no doubt be forced to retain voice mail in the future. This tech tip describes how Enterprise Vault version 6.0 SP3 (and above) users can implement a compliant retention of voice mail to meet regulatory and discovery demands.
Benefits and rules for archiving voicemail.
By archiving voicemail with the same policies and procedures used for email and other mandated corporate documents, companies can successfully comply with regulations and discovery procedures and avoid costly fines or business disruptions. Companies should archive voicemail much as they would their email correspondence. Voicemail archiving then becomes an extension of existing archiving procedures already in place at the company, rather than adopting new rules and processes. This simple extension of procedures is dependent on integration of voicemail with the archiving engine.
Enterprise Vault and Vault Solutions integration
In partnership with Vault Solutions LLC, Symantec has added voicemail archiving capabilities to Enterprise Vault 8.0. Customers using Archive Accelerator with IP-based call systems such as AVST CallXpress can now create voicemail archives using Enterprise Vault rules, policies and procedures. The system takes voicemail audio files (e.g. .WAV or MP3) and stores them in Enterprise Vault along with the following voicemail metadata:
- The caller’s name and phone number
- The recipient’s phone number or extension (and for internal calls, the recipient’s name)
- The date and time of the call
With this metadata, companies can retrieve voicemails as needed during discovery or to demonstrate compliance with retention regulations during audits.
Voicemail can be archived using many of the existing Enterprise Vault policies and procedures, including frequency of archiving and retention policies.
The archiving voicemail solution using Enterprise Vault and Archive Accelerator is available now.
