This website requires Adobe Flash Player. Get Flash

BlueSpace® TransMail™ - Email Records Solution

Email is the most frequent way that people communicate in business – according to a recent META Group survey, 80% of people prefer email to the phone. Email has significantly increased the ease and frequency of communications in business, and most business letters and internal memos are now sent via email.

However, email has now become one of the primary sources of evidential records for both regulatory investigations and lawsuits. Email was never designed to handle this type of content – it was designed for researchers to chat on ARPANET.

BlueSpace® TransMail™ has been specifically designed for content that constitutes business records in electronic mail. Its unique relational architecture allows every piece of content to be rigorously controlled according to an enterprise policy across its entire lifecycle. BlueSpace TransMail integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, and is highly intuitive for end users because it ‘feels like’ regular email.

Relational Mail

In email, every forward and reply duplicates the historical content, replicating it into the new email as part of the history. There is no link between the original email and every place it has been copied. This makes it extremely difficult to determine:

1. All recipients of a given email.
2. All servers and geographies the email has ‘touched’.
3. Whether anyone modified the email as part of a reply or forward.
4. Whether the email has been deleted or not.

With TransMail, every piece of content is maintained as a single instance record over its entire lifecycle. Every future reply and forward is associated with the original single copy. This is similar to the way internet sites work – every web page on a corporate website can reference the same corporate logo image that appears on all pages. TransAct Server is the platform that supports TransMail, and is a standards-compliant, J2EE application that integrates with existing email and other infrastructure.

Content Control

The TransMail relational model for message propagation allows for rigorous policing of every piece of content in compliance with an enterprise policy. Chinese Walls, variable retention policies, encryption, extensive search and discovery capabilities - they can all be applied to each piece of content across its entire lifecycle.

BlueSpace TransMail has a unique approach to integrity and authenticity. Every time a piece of content is sent, a ‘digital fingerprint’ (hash value) derived from the content is stored. Each time a TransMail is shown to a user, every piece of content (including all history portions) is validated using the original hash values, providing real-time guarantees of authenticity. In addition, every significant user action is recorded in a separate audit log.

BlueSpace TransMail handles both message bodies and attachments just like regular email. The content never touches the Microsoft Exchange system, which is why BlueSpace TransAct Server can guarantee rigorous management of the content. No other mail or messaging system provides the same level of granularity for managing content as BlueSpace TransMail.

User Experience

BlueSpace TransMail has been designed to ‘feel like’ regular email and integrate with a user’s existing enterprise email experience. A user can access BlueSpace from a regular computer using Microsoft Internet Explorer or Outlook (as shown), or from a mobile device such as the RIM Blackberry.

Summary

Email was never designed to handle content that constitutes mission-critical business records. BlueSpace TransMail has been designed specifically for this purpose.

A corporation must manage content that constitutes formal business records in a different manner to regular email. Retention and access controls are important, coupled with a user education policy that ensures that users write content that is suitable for production in court. Content can be selected for TransMail based on a subset of users (e.g. a division) or processes (e.g. HR content), and can be complimented with active monitoring to police compliance with an enterprise policy.

BlueSpace TransMail allows rigorous management of every piece of content over its entire lifecycle, coupled with authenticity guarantees and a full audit trail. All content is encrypted, and the security aspects are fully automated so they do not require user interaction. TransMail supports business process integration, and can communicate with external systems via web services. At the same time, it offers an intuitive user experience that integrates with a corporation’s existing email infrastructure.