Hosted email solutions using Live@Edu, Office 365, Google Doc’s ….

[zippo]

Hosted email solutions using Live@Edu, Office 365, Google Doc’s ….

 

I’m probably overthinking this and wonder if you could help clear or allay my concerns regarding free hosted email systems.

 

From what I can tell –virtually every free hosted email system supports only personal archiving of email. I don’t know what Google’s policy is; but I spoke with Microsoft and they said that they only kept content of emails for 30 days. I believe they have to keep the records of who emailed who and at what time for quite a bit longer.

 

I guess this is within the UK and EU data retention policies for ISP’s … but what about schools? Like businesses – surely schools need to keep archived materials relating to the “business” for several years? In an environment where emails are externally hosted and users responsible for keeping the archives; is this something to be worried or concerned about?

 

Then there is the duty of care relating to the students; do the schools not have a duty of care to identify certain activities that pose risks to the students? With no central archiving policy – how can a school trace and deal with situations?

[glennda]

if you use outlook and OST/PST files you can in theory download them locally although defeats the point of the object in it being cloud based!

[jamesbmarshall]

I don’t know what Google’s policy is; but I spoke with Microsoft and they said that they only kept content of emails for 30 days.

 

Only in the case of Exchange Online Plan 1 in Office 365 for education. If you need longer than 30 days for single item recovery there is always Exchange Online Plan 2.