Last week's InfoWorld includes a very telling article from Ephraim Schwartz that discusses some of the legal problems companies can run into when their Unified Messaging platforms store voice mail information alongside email information in the same database structures.

According to Schwartz, "...if your voice mail is archived along with your e-mail, as is the case with Exchange...the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure considers those voice mails to be documents subject to e-discovery regulations in the event of a lawsuit"

This means that if you're using Exchange to store both voice mail and email and you archive mail to a central location, you will be required to produce them like any other electronic document in the case of a legal battle. Yikes!

Schwartz has some interesting suggestions in his article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/27/14OPreality_1.html