Manage Exchange Online retention for compliance

Remove the record management burden on Exchange Online users and ensures email is compliant with regulations.

Brenda Prowse

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Brenda Prowse

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March 26, 2019
Manage Exchange Online retention for compliance

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Email is a big part of everyday life both at home and at work. Whether it‘s your personal or work mailbox, the number of emails you receive each day has been growing and growing at an explosive rate. According to Lifewire, by 2022, it estimated that we send 300 billion emails every day. The average information worker already receives upwards of one hundred emails a day. This number will only increase over time. Email continues to be the preferred means of communications in most modern workplaces. What does this mean for Exchange Online retention?

The problem with Exchange Online retention

So, what is the problem you ask? Consider that each of the emails in your organization’s mailboxes are information assets. These often contain sensitive and mission–critical information. This information is key to your organization’s ongoing operations.  

For example, think about emails between you and your critical vendors. These emails contain contract documents. They may also include requests for contract amendments and final agreements on contract terms. In today’s world, we lose many of these crucial information assets. They become trapped in people’s mailboxes.  

Of course, this is not done intentionally by those sending and receiving those type of emails. It is a side-effect of the unmanageable volume of information that people are dealing with on a day-to-day basis.

As a result, some organizations have put in-place email archiving solutions. These solutions provide the necessary retention of important emails. They also provide some visibility into the organization‘s emails estate.  

Manual archiving of email doesn’t work

But, these solutions often need users to put emails through a manual “archiving” workflow. For example, we can do archiving through third party plugins. We can also move emails to a managed repository like SharePoint Online.  

However, users cannot deal with the volume of information created by email. Asking them to do something manually does not work. It usually yields an inconsistent result in capturing critical information.

This result amounts to significant risk from compliance and legal perspective. This risk occurs when we don’t retain and classify information correctly and consistently. Also, some costs arise from not having visibility and management capability over your email.  

Imagine, if you needed to come up with a complete list of records about a vendor contract dispute. How would you go about finding all those emails from the mailboxes of those of working on the contract? How could you ensure that the list is accurate? How do you know people haven’t deleted essential emails in the meantime?

Records365 connector for Exchange Online retention

So, by now you have been saying to yourself, there must be a better way! And there is! RecordPoint has created a game–changer for organizations struggling with email management and compliance.  

The Records365 Exchange Online connector allows you to take control over your email. The best part is that we do this in a fully automated fashion. Records365 manages email records in-place. We remove the record management burden on Exchange Online users.

This connector means that people can get on with their work in Exchange Online. They do not need to interact with individual Outlook plugins or move emails into an archive.

Record managers can instantly gain visibility over the company’s email. They can view all their organization’s content sources through a single pane of glass. This view is in our modern and easy-to-use Records365 portal.  

How the Records365 Exchange Online connector works

Records365 captures emails from Exchange Online. We process the emails using our classification engine. This engine automatically applies the right file plan category and retention schedule to the email.  

Finally, our advanced search capabilities allow you to quickly and easily assemble an accurate list of records from all your content sources. This list now includes email for eDiscovery and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

Starting on the email record management journey can be daunting. However, we have made it as easy as possible to step into managing mailboxes. The Exchange Online connector requires no on-premise software or agent deployments. This approach means that it can be set up in a matter of minutes.  

The Records365 Exchange Connector has built-in settings. These settings allow you to start managing mailboxes in your organization gradually. You have complete control over the management of mailboxes by Records365. You can also specify what emails we keep within those mailboxes.  

This approach allows you to start the journey of retaining emails today, while still respecting the privacy of the mailbox users.

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View our expanded range of available Connectors, including popular SaaS platforms, such as Salesforce, Workday, Zendesk, SAP, and many more.

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Discover Connectors

View our expanded range of available Connectors, including popular SaaS platforms, such as Salesforce, Workday, Zendesk, SAP, and many more.

Explore the Platform
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