Another Reminder Why Email Archiving is Important...
Every once in a while, a story starts making headlines that reminds me why I do what I do (and why email archiving is important). This week’s headline grabber is all the hoopla surrounding U.S. Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan. Controversial for a number of reasons, if Kagan is confirmed by the Senate, she will be the first Supreme Court Justice in nearly four decades without any prior experience as a federal or state judge, which means she has not created a paper trail of court opinions typically used to assess a nominee's ideology.
However, she did serve as a Clinton adviser in the 1990s, around the same time that the Clinton administration implemented an email archiving strategy to archive email from its Lotus-Notes-based email system. At the time, the Clinton administration implemented the email archiving solution in response to a 1993 court decision that stated that that the president has an obligation to ensure that the emails of senior officials are preserved.
(The Bush Administration later replaced the Lotus Notes-based email system used by Clinton with Outlook and Exchange which wasn’t compatible with the old archiving system, and resulted in the loss of millions of email records, which were later found... but perhaps that’s the subject of another post.)
Over the next few weeks, the Clinton library, run by the National Archives, is expected to release every piece of email that Kagan sent and received during her tenure as a Clinton adviser, approximately 79,000 pages of email in all, to help establish her credibility as a nominee.
If Kagan wins the nomination this summer, she probably has a lot of people to thank. If I were her, I’d add Bill Clinton and his IT team to that list.
– Debbie Howlett
Debbie Howlett is the Director of Product Marketing at Messaging Architects.
