Prediction No.5: New Content To Manage

Remember your first reaction when you found out you had to manage content like e-mail and instant messages as part of the business record for compliance regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley. Remember the collective "Oh Brother" you heard from your department. Well repeat after me . . . "Oh Brother" because its happening again.

With the growing popularity of blogs in the enterprise and the use of wikis in corporate settings, these outlets are being recognized to contain potential material information and, therefore, will need to be managed for compliance.

If you employ wiki technology to gather comment or provide an open forum for customers, the information you collect via wikis could also become material. Hey, if you set it up, the information is yours. Your company, theoretically, has knowledge of the information, which must be documented.If you're already dealing with blogs and wikis, I don't need to tell you how potent these avenues for expression can be. So if you have some prolific bloggers in your organization, and who doesn't, better find a way to secure and archive the material with proper version control. And while you're at it, suggest that the company develop policies on what can and can't be discussed in blogs.

Some vendors are already responding to this, by adding blogs and RSS to the messaging protocol their products monitor and/or archive for compliance purposes. For instance, the new CipherTrust IronNet gateway appliance monitors information across communication protocols, including e-mail, IM, blogs and FTP. And IBM has demonstrated a group of software products and services called the Public Image Monitoring Solution to manage data generated by e-mails, blogs, wikis, jams, news feeds.

Add it to your list for 2006. When someone decides to wax eloquent, the last thing your team wants to do is manually monitor it.