Unified Communications Compliance
Implement a compliant communications infrastructure without sacrificing business processes or end-user productivity.

Compliance capabilities simplify organizational, legal, and regulatory compliance requirements by enabling administrators to easily set policies for filtering, examining, and archiving for many forms of communications.

New and changing state, national, and international laws require electronic communications systems to support corporate governance and compliance policies. Beyond explicit compliance requirements, a growing number of organizations want to ensure that they are using IT best practices and tools to support their internal governance efforts.

Microsoft Unified Communications solutions help organizations meet compliance requirements in four areas:

• Protection: prevent information disclosure and establish ethical walls
• Preservation: retain only those communications of business or legal significance
• Discovery: enable legal and HR to quickly find information for audits or litigation
• Proof: help legal counsel more easily show the who, what, and when of communications
  

Protect
Microsoft unified communications built-in protections that help organizations keep communications secure. This protection extends to IM, mobile devices, and communications between partners and external staff. Unified communication provides layers of defense against evolving needs and flexibility to meet ever-changing requirements.

Preserve
To manage mailbox sizes, IT managers will often apply a single default expiration policy across an organization. However, this forces users to offload mail items to PST folders which, in turn, making it difficult to manage and retrieve this data centrally for eDiscovery and compliance.

Custom Managed Folders in Exchange help address this issue by providing multiple expiration options. Users simply drag and drop mail into these folders which then automatically apply specific expiration, retention, or journaling policies. Exchange Server also includes per-user/per-DL journaling capability. This is critical for those customers who want to deploy a third-party archiving solution for regulatory or storage management issues.

Office Communications Server (OCS) has a comprehensive Call Detail Records (CDR) system that lets you track multiple communication types from a single interface.

Discover
The 2006 revision of the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) requires organizations to produce all relevant electronic evidence within a very tight timeframe (typically 120 days after a complaint has been served). Email that has been expired through normal expiration policies may be exempt, but only if a “good faith” discovery process is fully defined, fully documented, and fully followed.

Exchange Server’s retention policy settings and OCS journaling and CDR provide a basis for streamlined discovery of critical communications. Additional features include: Legal Hold which prevents deletion of mail in specified mailboxes; enhanced multi-mailbox search, and full text indexing engine that works on both email and attachments.

Prove (Auditing and Reporting)
Many regulations require proof as to the authenticity of policies and procedures related to data controls. Exchange provides detailed reporting that tracks: logging for creation of Managed Folders, moving messages to a folder, deletion or mailbox journaling of items as well as search logging and transport journaling activity. OCS can record and audit conversations, including creation of call detail records that capture time, date, attendees, and related information for: IM sessions, Multiparty A/V conference and Web conferencing.