Unified Communications Featured Article

 In an effort to protect transparency in government, states have some form of a law mandating that all government business be conducted during open meetings, which the public can has access. According to the so-called “Open Meeting Law,” public business must be performed in an open manner so people can  observe the performance and listen to the deliberations and decisions of that forum.

 

While Open Meeting Laws primarily apply to governmental groups that meet and vote on various issues, such as local governments, state commissions, school boards and town councils, the law itself has important widespread implications for other areas, as well.

 

For example, joint letters, conference calls and e-mail typically entail “deliberation” and are subject to the Open Meeting Laws. The goal of the law is to ensure that deliberation and decision making remains accessible to everyone and that all communication is available for review.   

 

Officials with 123Together.com, a Burlington, Mass.-based provider of hosted business services including hosted Exchange and e-mail archiving, said the company’s GuardDoc Hosted Email Archiving offers users both Open Meeting compliance, as well as storage resource management.

 

The GuardDoc archiving service helps companies implement hosted e-mail archiving solutions to comply with the Open Meeting Laws. With the ability to capture and store all e-mail messages, full text indexing of e-mails and attachments, quick search and retrieval, businesses can easily conform to the law.

 

In addition, 123Together.com’s (News - Alert) GuardDoc Hosted E-mail Archiving Service lets customers access data around the clock using its Web-based interface, and easily search e-mail and export the messages in different file formats including .pst, text, .pdf, mime, among others.