Let’s all remember Watergate shall we. There are good reasons why you want the Administration to keep a clear record of what they have done.

The real problem with instant messaging is that it is not secure and the audit trail is horrible to non-existent. (One can only imagine the hoops that RIM had to jump through and the concessions and promises they made to Obama’s team so that Obama could keep his BlackBerry – I bet Obama’s emails do not get routed through Canada – there is probably a big RIM server sitting in Langley right now.)

Email generally has a problem with organizing and archiving emails. There does not appear to be any email program available which adequately logs incoming and outgoing email in a way which can be sensibly retrieved in the event of litigation.

I work for a state funded university where the IT department recently (ok, so it was 2 years ago or so) removed the ability to save or print IM conversations from within the IM tool itself (they distribute Novell for internal use).

Can anyone come up with a logical business reason to make a communication tool more difficult to use or less useful (for internal communications)? Now shift to politics (higher education systems are highly political entities to work within) and there can be lots of reasons for not wanting IM’s to be ‘officially’ recorded or logged.

By making all records only available in 3rd party systems (users can and still do copy/paste into Word or other text editors to print/save various conversations) they have basically removed any validity from anything that could have been said via IM (they can now deny things were said via IM, since there is no official record).

On a smaller scale our IT department made the same decision as the Whitehouse, they don’t want to allow IM’s to be ‘official’ records, but they can’t just stop people from using them, so they neuter the tools and make it more difficult for users to communicate and perform their basic daily tasks. If someone IM’s info to another individual and they want a printed copy, it takes them another minute or two to get it, so while they haven’t stopped the behavior, they have made it much easier to deny the validity of any ‘copies’ of IM conversations (which are arguably one of the easiest types of communications to ‘mock up’ and print out).

How would you like it if every single off-the record chat or email was used against you?

Point is, most intelligence comes from 2 words out of every 1000, and the media feeds on those two words. Seriously. They want to push forward that which has an emotional value. Just look at the whole Dr.Biden/Oprah interview.

Seems there’s a lot of Microsoft people here. Perhaps you should perform due diligence and ping your Microsoft HR rep to determine the number employees and even 2nd hand help who have been let go which have IM messages, email, or the like as their disposition before offering up your asinine recommendations.

To those external, you may be surprised why even Microsoft can’t keep their highest performing employees. They are afraid, internally, of rocking the boat, and any idea which would challenge them to be a better performing company. I’ve learned a LOT from the MiniMicrosoft blog, and maybe you should take your own medicine for once. Microsoft will only grow if it brings new technology or ideas in as part of the process.

I wonder what Microsoft’s employee and contractor retention rate is. It’s never been published, has it?

I think too many are looking at things innocently.

Information can be recorded and IM can be a rather “loose” form of conversation. There’s probably more concern of information being retained on the client side, not the server side. That information could, either, get into the wrong hands or be turned to look horribly bad in the hands of someone disgruntled.

Part of the problem is that too many people are still way too stupid with technology. I’ll even throw in that I think that if Obama gets his way we’ll have our first mammoth government leak by way of technology.