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Smarsh Launches Compliance Archiving for Salesforce Chatter

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How can the explosion in social media communications conform to compliance requirements? Compliance solution provider Smarsh has launched Archiving & Compliance for Salesforce Chatter, that might just make it a little easier for companies to meet those standards.

The service, offered on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, allows organizations to capture, preserve or search Chatter files, so that they can be used for compliance, recordkeeping and e-Discovery initiatives.

Uses Salesforce Platform

The Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh offers hosted solutions for archiving electronic communications for compliance and record retention. The archived communications include email, IMs and such social media platforms as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and now Chatter. Founded in 2001, the company was originally a financial technology solutions and consulting company that turned to email archiving as financial firms had to meet regulatory mandates from federal agencies.

The Archiving & Compliance service for Chatter is built on Salesforce’s cloud-based app platform. All data can be captured in real-time, thus minimizing the risk of lost data from the communication streams, and the service also archives Chatter attachments. Customers are not charged for storage or disk space.

Communication is stored in non-erasable, non-rewriteable media (write once, read many optical storage) in the native format, it’s available worldwide through the Web-based Smarsh Management Console, and it’s redundantly preserved in geographically-dispersed data centers.

Review Hierarchy

Search can be conducted across all objects in the Chatter communities, and results allow searchers to review communication threads. Repeated searches can be saved, and searches can be customized with company-approved lexicons of keywords or phrases -- or Smarsh’s default list can be used.

There’s also a permission-based review hierarchy, which can be structured so that it emulates the review structure of a given organization. Message supervision roles can be assigned to specific users and groups with appropriate access and functionalities, and temporary permissions or access can be granted, such as for outside legal counsel. Every administrator session and action is documented.

Messages can be annotated, flagged or escalated, and those actions themselves become searchable. A Reporting Center provides analytics reports on usage, system audit history and message archive data, and message data can be exported in the EDRM XML Interchange Format Schema or other popular e-Discovery vendor “load file” formats.
 

About the Author
Barry Levine

Levine is a technology writer and TV/Web producer who has worked in interactive media and TV since 1986, and in linear media (film, TV) for a dozen years before that. He founded and ran the Web department at Thirteen/WNET, the major PBS station in NY; invented/produced/wrote a successful interactive sound game (PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game, 400,000+ units sold;) founded and, for a decade, ran a nationally-recognized independent film showcase at Harvard (CENTER SCREEN;) served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Connect with Barry Levine:

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