Today’s agenda has Mark joining on the call to talk about what talk about TeleMessage, Mobile Solutions and the regulations that are required for some states and local governments. You’re also going to see how TeleMessage does this and the products that they use for connecting employees’ mobile data with Microsoft purview and then Gil is going to go into a demo of what this looks like in real time. After Gill’s demo I’m actually going to do a demo of the Microsoft Purview Solutions which you can use once you capture those messages and what you can do in the Microsoft Purview Solutions. So with that I’ll hand it over to Mark.
Mark: Thank you Leo. Let me share my screen and we will go into the first slide which talks a little bit about TeleMessage. This is the only slide I have about TeleMessage so you don’t have to worry about five or six different slides. TeleMessage has been around for over 22 years and both Gill and I have been with the company for almost all of those 22 years and over those 22 years we have accumulated experience with more than 500 different companies that are utilizing our archiving solutions. I do have three business units that I support. One of those business units is specifically for archiving. We are a Microsoft partner of course (if you haven’t gotten that already). Since we are presenting during this webinar and our locations where the routing happens are specific ISO and or SOC 2 compliant data centers, we can talk a little bit more about that as we go along as well. What TeleMessage does simply is we collect for you mobile message content and we take that content and we transport it into the Microsoft environment for you we have a large number of customers. As you can see some of those logos on the bottom both on the federal side and on the SLED side and I will be pointing out specific examples as we go along.
This slide is quite honestly not meant to do any kind of shaming of people but in general you must know about specific instances that have happened, where some people have felt that they were either above the regulations, exempt for the review from the regulations, or didn’t know about the regulations that are out there. But there have been many of these and the real reason here for me to display this is because I don’t want you all to be part of this so TeleMessage and Microsoft do have a solution for you to implement in order to make sure that your county, city, or state does not get put into the press this way.
What are those regulations that I’m talking about? Well, simply, it’s two of them on the SLED side. You have the Freedom of Information Act and you have the Public Records Act. In both of those specifically it outlines that mobile device communications to be archived have to be retained and they have to be archived and stored off-line. Now the definition of what mobile communication is or what the definition of text messaging is has been broadened lately so it used to be just the regular text messages that are sent on mobile phones but it now also includes any kind of alternative messaging that is done on the mobile phone as well, so during the presentation and during the demonstration I’ll also talk a little bit more about what that is—what is that alternative messaging as well as the regular text messaging.
So this happens to be a nice little slide [US state map] if you go to that link at the top of the page it will go to the TeleMessage website and on the TeleMessage website if you have you know a specific need to know what regulations you have in your state. We’ve done a pretty good job at describing what those are for each state. No, not every state is regulated by those regulations that I brought up on the last page but there are a large number of them that are. And then there are a large number of states that are being proactive before they are regulated in implementing these archiving services. Just again an example: If you clicked on Washington up in that top left hand side you know and you looked back two slides ago the city of Seattle is a very large customer of both Microsoft and TeleMessage as an example and then if we go down to the bottom of that map then you see the huge state of Texas you know the City of Austin is an example of a joint customer of both of ours as well and I could actually pick and choose a variety of other states and customers in case any of you wanted to interact with some other entities that are utilizing both services
As a brief example of the products that TeleMessage does collecting and transporting from can be divided into two different categories. The category of products on the left hand side in the blue are what I would call regular or native text message archiving; the products on the right hand side underneath the green are some of the alternative messaging products that TeleMessage archives as well. So over on the left I’ll briefly describe each of these products and give you a one minute elevator pitch and then I have a little more detail of each one:
- The Network Archiver (NA) enables TeleMessage to grab the text and multimedia content off of corporate phones directly from the carrier networks so I have direct connections into the carrier networks and I can grab the content. You just basically supply me with the mobile numbers and I can grab the content directly from the carrier and store it inside of Microsoft for you. This is only available on select carriers (most of the major carriers), but it is not available on every carrier. There are still 20 different smaller carriers in the United States so it’s not available for all but of course the majority of the large ones.
- The Android Archiver which is the second product is used in case I don’t have a relationship with one of the smaller geographical carriers and you happen to have an Android phone. This product enables me to grab the content directly from the phone not from the carrier so it’s a little utility you put onto the phone and all the text multimedia and or voice native voice calls (not that voice is regulated but if you wanted to capture it you could capture it and store it with inside of Microsoft). But as the name suggests it only works on Android phones and will not work on iOS phones. These first two products are only good for corporate or state or federal or SLED-owned phones so I capture everything from the phones with these two products so they will not work well on a BYOD or personal phone—but they are great for SLED-owned phones.
- The third product called the Enterprise Number Archiver is a product that will work on a personal or BYOD phone. It’s a separate messaging application which I tie to a separate mobile number which I supply to you directly to the application and as long as the employee uses the application for all their business use it will collect everything. It will collect all the text and multimedia sent from it. It is a very simple application it looks and acts very similar to the way iMessage does when you use the regular editor, the Samsung editor, the AI message editor on an Apple phone. It will not capture that content so you clearly can differentiate between personal messages sent and business messages sent.
Over on the right are WhatsApp and Signal. I’m actually allowing the employee to use regular WhatsApp or regular Signal. They use it and I capture all the content they sent and received from within WhatsApp or Signal
Let’s talk a little bit about each of these products. So I mentioned most of these bullets already on the NA so again it’s used on corporate phones it’s Network grabbing of the messages so I’m grabbing the content from the carrier and storing it within 365. not good with personal phones because I grab everything. NA also does not work on grabbing calls if you had an interest in grabbing the calls it cannot do that it can just grab the text in multimedia better work on anything that has a text plan so if you have a a non-smart (we call them dumb phones / flip phones, iPads) that have a number and have a text plan on them it will capture all of the content from them
Now I talked a little bit about WhatsApp and Signal as you can see let’s go to the right hand side of this slide where it shows you I can have both a regular WhatsApp on the phone and an archiving version of WhatsApp on the phone where I capture the content from one and I don’t capture the content from the other. So if you’re trying to capture WhatsApp messages on a personal phone I can do that. If it’s a corporate phone—you know a SLED phone—then I can have a single version of WhatsApp that just does archiving on that phone. I can also, if you choose, archive content from WhatsApp for business if that’s a better choice for you I can capture content from that as well. So you’re using the actual WhatsApp for business and I’m capturing all the content from it.
On the left side are examples of Signal. I can do the exact same for Signal so you can have an archiving version of Signal on your phone. It’ll archive everything from it with the exception of calls (today) or I can have both a personal version and an archiving version of Signal on the same phone.
…So I’m going to just skip the rest for now and talk specifically about how the content flows into Microsoft 365. On the left side you’ll see all of the products that I talked about all of that content flows directly into something called the TeleMessage router. The TeleMessage router that adds specific meta tags to the content so if I know who the employee is, and what the email address is of the employee.
I certainly know which product the content is coming from I also know if it’s part of a group chat message so I can have thread IDs associated with the messages and then what I do is I transport that content instantaneously real time in most cases directly into the Microsoft 365 environment and then once I get confirmation that it is received successfully within 365, it is removed and deleted from the router. So you have two choices on the router you can have it real time which means it’s instantaneously delivered over into the Microsoft environment and deleted from the router or I have a second choice which is I can combine messages together into a single thread all to have the same thread ID, securely store them on the router for 24 hours combining them together and then the following day deliver a single message into Microsoft 365 into a regular email box; two different choices for you.