Osterman Research has found that roughly one-third of the typical information worker’s day is spent working on a mobile device, and an even greater proportion of work-related content is accessed using mobile devices. The impetus for the growing use of mobile devices is driven by a number of factors, although the use of personally owned devices is a key factor in their adoption in the workplace. As shown in the following figure, the use of company-owned and personally-owned smartphones is on the increase.
The use of messaging applications on mobile devices, such as email and SMS/text messaging, are among the most common applications of mobile devices in the workplace. The vast majority of users who employ a smartphone for work-related uses employ some type of messaging-related application on a regular basis.
There are a number of difficulties associated with the archival of text messaging content. For example:
- Text messages sent using telecom carriers are often retained only for brief periods, and so these providers cannot be relied upon a source of archived text messages for long periods.
- Since some companies operate in multiple countries using carriers that often do not provide any sort of text messaging archival service, enterprises often employ different methods to archive text messages, such as doing a physical backup of a device.
- Further complicating the archival of text messages is the lack of commonality for archiving content depending on the device in use. Some solutions pull content directly from the server (e.g., with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server), while others install an app on the mobile device that transmits text messages to the archive. Other tools, such as SMS Backup+ for Android devices, will move text messages into a user’s Gmail account where they can be backed up or archived indirectly.
The bottom line is that organizations using various and inconsistent methods for archival of text messages makes the process inefficient, expensive and prone to error. The result can be incomplete archives of text messages and the consequences that go along with this level of inconsistency. Therefore, it’s essential to choose the right vendor that can provide a consistent and unified method for text message archival.
We have recently published a white paper on text messaging archiving that you can download here.