Compliance / conversation retention?

[James Daily]

Many US companies are required by law to store all electronic
communication for X number of years, and have it available for auditor
review at any time.

What archiving capabilities does Wave have? Is there any way to
estimate storage space required for "wave" data? Is it possible/
sensible for wave servers to archive inactive / abandoned waves?

I'd love to integrate this into a corporate collaboration tool, but
data retention is often a big hurdle for acceptance of such tools.

-Jim

[johnC]

I have similar questions Jim, as the e-Learning Coordinator of an
Australian Tertiary Education Organisation we see great Learning
potential for Wave.We too have compliance requirements around archive
storage and data retention

[Mike Sassak]

Archiving and data-retention requirements will have to be implemented at the Wave server level, and how Google's reference implementation handles that is anybody's guess at the moment, though perhaps a friendly Googler will clue us in. In general though, there isn't much about the Wave protocol which suggests meeting those types of requirements will be impossible or painful. Wave is built atop XMPP, and there are already many XMPP servers which support robust data retention of the types required by governments and large businesses.

As for the size of the data set, a lot will depend on what exactly you're doing with a particular wave client. In the end, wavelets are just XML. Now it's possible to have enormous XML documents, but I doubt it's going to get much worse, relatively speaking, than ensuring your email is backed up and retained.

[Richard Clark]

You actually have two options here:

1. Utilize a wave server that can perform archiving,
2. Ensure that an archive-robot is added as a participant
automatically in any wave you need to archive

Both are likely to be possible in short order. Indeed it isn't
actually clear whether a wavelet ever actually "ends", and so far I
haven't seen anything in the protocol discussing wavelet closure. As a
consequence, it is possible that the initial releases of the server
will never actually delete data. Obviously this will become a problem
for people with limited disk space, but Google doesn't have that
problem and with rapidly increasing disk sizes maybe the idea is that
the data never goes offline.

[scottpjohnson]

According to the protocol, the authoritative wave server for a
particular wavelet must be able to replay the operational
transformations to that wavelet, such that the entire history of the
wave can be replayed. This is used for synchronizing downstream wave
servers (i.e. servers of remote participants) and for re-viewing the
wavelet history. The changes to a wave exist as a linearly ordered
series of deltas (i.e. the operational transformations), and the
entire thing already has to be persistently stored in the wave
server's wave storage for replay at any time in the future.

My assumption then is that data retention in this case would be
handled not by the wave server protocol itself, but instead be a
function of whatever storage backup policy is already in place on the
server/hardware level.

Regards,
Scott

[Dyolf]

That was my first thought as well.

The notion referred to by Richard Clark that a wavelet may not end
makes for an interesting dynamic with traditional views of records
management and compliance.

When is a wave "document" final? What is the impact of the payback
feature on the final document i.e. what happens if edits are made
during the collaboration phase which are then removed before the
document is "published". Can the playback histroy be purged? Or will
it be part of the official record?

Wave looks amazing but there will be some interesting debates around
compliance that will happen before it gets accepted uptake inside
enterprises and esp. government.

On May 30, 6:28 am, James Daily <jamesda...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Brett Morgan]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Dyolf<tyrr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That was my first thought as well.
>
> The notion referred to by Richard Clark that a wavelet may not end
> makes for an interesting dynamic with traditional views of records
> management and compliance.
>
> When is a wave "document" final?  What is the impact of the payback
> feature on the final document i.e. what happens if edits are made
> during the collaboration phase which are then removed before the
> document is "published". Can the playback histroy be purged? Or will
> it be part of the official record?

I'd suggest that these style of decisions are up to the wave server
developer, and thus can be customised to suit a particular client's
needs. Even working with the wave server code base as demonstrated,
there is already the ability to work in one wave, and then publish the
document to another wave, thus allowing the collarboration wave and
the wave of record to be separate entities.

> Wave looks amazing but there will be some interesting debates around
> compliance that will happen before it gets accepted uptake inside
> enterprises and esp. government.

From what I've seen governments and large corporates adapt after the
fact when new technology is introduced. Given the fact that wave
servers are going to common place, and spread in a fashion akin to
linux, the ability of large corporates and governments to keep them
out of the workplace is going to be hard simply because there is no
need to raise a purchase order to install one.

> On May 30, 6:28 am, James Daily <jamesda...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Many US companies are required by law to store all electronic
>> communication for X number of years, and have it available for auditor
>> review at any time.
>>
>> What archiving capabilities does Wave have? Is there any way to
>> estimate storage space required for "wave" data? Is it possible/
>> sensible for wave servers to archive inactive / abandoned waves?
>>
>> I'd love to integrate this into a corporate collaboration tool, but
>> data retention is often a big hurdle for acceptance of such tools.
>>
>> -Jim
> >
>

--

Brett Morgan http://brett.morgan.googlepages.com/