Enterprise text messaging is one of the fastest trends in organization communication. Just as text messaging, chat apps, and collaborative group messaging apps have become so ingrained in the consumer market, they have also become widely utilized within the modern workplace.
Due to the compliance risks associated with inappropriate use of text messaging and other forms of electronic communication, many companies choose to prohibit the use of such a tool in their workplace. However, a no-texting policy is not an effective deterrent to prevent employees from using their personal devices to communicate with their colleagues – let alone relieve your organization from any compliance burden it has to bear with regards to supervision and archiving business text messages.
Read on as we detail in this infographic the five question you should ask to determine if your organization is at risk of breaching any supervision and archiving regulations regarding text messaging in the workplace.
1. What’s the Mobile Device Ownership in Your Workplace?
The current mobile device ownership scenario in your organization is crucial as it will affect not only your text messaging policy but also the archiving platform that you’ll need to choose.
Corporate device ownership can be categorized into three main groups: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Choose Your Own Device (CYOD), and Corporate-Owned Personally Enabled (COPE). Your workplace may have a combination of these mobile device ownership setup, so conducting an internal survey should provide you with insight into your organization’s current mix.
Such insight will ultimately help you decide:
- Do you need to standardize your organization’s ownership model?
- What text messaging policies should be created and enforced?
- What is the right archiving platform to address your unique business requirements?
2. Do You Have a Text Messaging Policy?
Regardless of the industry you are in, you must have mobile device policies that include a documented definition of what counts as a mobile device, as well as the responsibilities of the employees when using their device inside the workplace.
However, to achieve compliance with different text message archiving regulations, you must ensure that your mobile device policy also has documented text messaging rules and standards that your employees must observe.
Your text messaging policy should detail, among other factors, the type of content and devices that you will archive, and how employees can exclude or prevent their personal conversations from being captured, retained, and supervised.
3. Can You Archive Text Messages Sent From Different Mobile Carriers?
It is important to know if the mobile carriers your organization uses can support text archiving, and, if iOS devices are issued to employees, can you disable iMessages, as messages sent through this method are challenging or impossible to archive at the carrier level.
If you’re issuing mobile devices to your employees and want to archive text messages at the carrier level, you can consider investing in the TeleMessage Network Archiver, as this platform allows you to collect copies of text messages of your company employees from multiple mobile carriers and forward those records to your enterprise archive database.
This solution will allow you to capture text messages without the need to install any apps in the device and thus, your employees can communicate with their colleagues without any disruption – all while eliminating the risk of non-compliance with various text message archiving regulations.
4. Do You Need to Use a Mobile Device Management Solution?
The mobile device management (MDM) platform is a software that allows IT administrators to control, secure, and enforce policies on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices used for business purposes.
Typically, MDM solutions are often deployed by companies that have BYOD culture, although it can also be used to control and supervise company-owned devices, especially if the organization has hundreds or thousands of mobile phones issued to employees.
If your organization intends to use an MDM solution to make mobile supervision more manageable, it is wise to choose one that is already or can be integrated with your mobile archiving platform. That way, you will not only be able to capture text messages, but also enforce policies and controls onto all the devices deployed across your organization in just one platform.
5. Do You Have a Unified Mobile Archiving Platform in Place?
As stated earlier, text message archiving and supervision of the archived communications are mandatory in many industries, including the financial, healthcare, and government sector. In such complex and ever-changing industries, having a unified mobile archiving platform is crucial not only to capture, retain, and supervise text messages, but also conversations in other mobile channels such as email, social media, web, chat apps, IMs, MMS, and others.
Ideally, an enterprise mobile archiving should be able to archive mobile content regardless of the mobile ownership culture, the mobile OS, or mobile carriers used in the workplace.
The TeleMessage Mobile Archiver effectively addresses compliance, regulatory, eDiscovery response requirements and reduces risk across a variety of industries. TeleMessage captures mobile content, including SMS, MMS, Calls, and Chats from corporate or BYOD mobile phones. Messages are securely and reliably retained within TeleMessage servers or forwarded to an archiving data storage vendor of your choice.
Our mobile archiving solutions securely capture content from mobile carriers and mobile devices for a variety of ownership models (BYOD, CYOD, and employer-issued). With our multiple archiving methods, you can always find the right tools or blend for your requirements:
TeleMessage offers cross-carrier and international mobile text & calls archiving for corporate, CYOD and BYOD phones. Contact us today to try our mobile archiving products.
