In this podcast Vincent Hoolt describes the new guidelines of the Netherlands government towards managing its own email.

The guidelines ask Netherlands government agencies to schedule the email accounts of selected key staff for permanent preservation. The officials concerned usually constitute around 5% of the headcount of an agency.  The email within the accounts of other staff are retained for ten years.   All individuals are able to delete or move personal and trivial email within a window of ten weeks after the email was sent/received.

The policy draws its inspiration from the Capstone approach adopted by NARA towards US federal government email.  

Vincent talks about how the policy is working in practice, and the challenges of managing email accounts over time and in the context of GDPR.

Vincent Hoolt is Recordkeeping advisor at the Netherlands National Archives.  Vincent was interviewed by James Lappin on 21 December 2020.  The guidelines on managing Netherlands government email are available (in Dutch) from here .

In this podcast Rob Bath joins James Lappin to explore the records management implications of the recent meteoric rise in adoption of Microsoft Teams.

Rob describes:

• measures that can be taken to reduce the risk of Microsoft Teams sprawl, and to ensure that administrators can track the ownership of each Team;
• the modular structure of MS Teams, the absence of any overarching structure above each Team, and the implications of the fact that the list of an organisation’s Teams is available only to those with access to the Compliance centre of their organisation's Microsoft 365 tenancy;
• the reasons why the majority of Teams message traffic tends to go through individual chat accounts rather than through Team channels;
• the debates over the basis on which retention decisions should be made on messages in individual Teams chat accounts;
• the technical barriers to closing and archiving a Team;
• the relationship between MS Teams and SharePoint, and the implications of a Microsoft Teams roll out for an organisation's existing SharePoint implementation.

Rob Bath is Information Management & Compliance Practice Lead at Intelogy. He is also Digital Director for IRMS. Rob's blogpost on configuration choices with regard to MS Teams (referred to in the podcast) can be found here. His blogpost on retention issues in relation to MS Teams can be found here. Rob's recent webinar on the governance of MS Teams can be viewed on the IRMS YouTube channel here.

Rob Bath was interviewed by James Lappin on 12 August 2020.