A retention policy for electronically stored information is a definition of how long one will keep a certain type of information before it’s destroyed. Eg, perhaps you keep tax records for 7 years, intellectual property material for 15 years. Or perhaps you keep everything for an indeterminate period.

You can see retention policies for various organizations here--see comments further down this page. If you add your own data, we will send you a summary of the findings. Please either post your response as a comment, or if you need anonymity, email it to survey@ferris.com and we’ll post your response without identifying you.

Many thanks--David Ferris

Q1. Rough # people in your organization/company?

Q2. What is your title and what do you do?

Q3. What type of business/industry are you in?

Q4. What are your retention policies?

Q5. Did any internal policies, laws and/or regulations have impact on your retention policies? If so, which?

Q6. What advice would you give to peers trying to formulate and implement their retention policies?

Q7. How will your retention policies change over the next few years?

Q8. What are the main archiving products/services you use? If you have a home-grown solution, please tell us about it.

Q9. Are there additional retention-related questions on your mind, or do you have any other comments?

JINGLE is a protocol developed by Google and the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) to support VoIP (Voice over IP) communication, and it is used in Google Talk. We are seeing increased implementation of JINGLE (Wikipedia lists 11 implementations, including Google Talk, and we are aware of more).

XMPP is the Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Many XMPP clients now offer a “call” button (typically with a green phone icon) for each buddy (the XMPP roster) that allows direct voice communication between XMPP users. This integration is a useful capability. Voice communication goes directly client to client using the real-time VoIP protocol.

In order for this to work, the VoIP connection needs to be established, and this needs a session initiation protocol to communicate the desire to communicate and then negotiate the details of the VoIP connection to be used. JINGLE, which reflects the ringing of a telephone, is the XMPP protocol used to achieve this.

JINGLE is a general-purpose session initiation protocol, and can be used to negotiate connections for other services such as video, and can also set up multiparty conferences.

JINGLE is an important standard that seems certain to grow with XMPP and be used alongside XMPP, to support voice and video for XMPP clients. Voice calls from such clients can be gatewayed to other VoIP services, mobile and landline. GTalk2VoIP is an example of such a service.

The XMPP/JINGLE/VoIP combination of open standards gives a clear platform for solutions to compete against Skype, the (proprietary) market-leading software phone system.

… Steve Kille

In October 2007, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) industry group released an XML standard for easing the transfer of electronically stored information (ESI). EDRM has now released new tools and documentation to support the adoption of this standard.

In January 2008, EDRM released the following for download:

• Updated EDRM XML compliance load file (Jan. 23, 2008). For testing a product’s ability to import compliant XML files.
• EDRM XML Interchange Format Schema Documentation (Jan. 23, 2008). Describes the XML format.
• Updated EDRM XML XSD (Jan. 11, 2008). The actual XML Schema Definition.
• EDRM XML Validation Tool, Version 1.0.6 (Jan. 9, 2008). For testing a product’s ability to export compliant XML files.

EDRM also has an on-demand webinar that provides a good primer on this standard.

Electronic discovery (e-discovery) is complex due to the volume of data that must be analyzed, and the diversity of ESI sources. It is further complicated by the number of different tools (products and/or services) used through the process. Adoption of a common format to move data between tools will speed up the discovery process, reduce costs, and increase the quality of the presented content. This is the objective for the EDRM XML standard.

… Colin R. Bush