December 17, 2007, 9:48 AM — Gwava, the developer of security software, plans to introduce on Monday a new
product that lets enterprises easily track and find text messages and phone
calls that BlackBerry users send and receive.
The software should appeal to enterprises that need to comply with regulations
that require them to track employee communications. Key to the Retain for BlackBerry
Enterprise Server is that it doesn't require any client software. That means
an IT administrator can manage it fully from the back end.
The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which companies use to let workers
send and receive corporate e-mail on their BlackBerry devices, already logs
data about SMS (Short Message Service) text messages and e-mails sent and received.
However, users must view the data in a giant Excel spreadsheet where each row
is one transaction, said Mitch Lauer, director of business development for Gwava.
"It's extremely difficult to utilize," he said.
"Our software goes into the BES and makes sense of all these logs,"
he said. Retain shifts the data to a SQL database. IT administrators can then
manipulate the data using a viewer that can be accessed on multiple workstations.
On the viewer, an administrator sees a list of BlackBerry users and can view
their history of e-mails, text messages and phone calls. The list of e-mail
and text messages includes the actual messages as well as who sent and received
them. The phone call list includes the phone number of the person who called
or was called and the length of the call.
Enterprises using BlackBerry phones can already easily audit e-mail messages
because they run through a separate e-mail server, such as Microsoft Exchange.
But tracking text messages is harder, and Retain lets administrators see e-mail,
text messages and voice logs in a single view.
The software also tracks Pin messages, which are text messages that BlackBerry
users can send to each other in a slightly different way than text messages
offered by mobile operators.
IT administrators can also view data such as the top ten users of phone calls
in chart form. To further analyze or investigate an issue, an administrator
can also export the information into Excel.
Retain for BlackBerry can also send alerts to administrators when specified
keywords appear in user text messages.
Gwava envisions many reasons that an enterprise might want to use the software,
including to comply with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act or Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to investigate human-resources
issues such as sexual harassment, or to pursue legal problems such as intellectual
property leaks, Lauer said.
While similar offerings exist, Retain for BlackBerry has an advantage because
it doesn't require any software for the BlackBerry phones, Lauer said. That
makes it easier for IT administrators to manage, and also means that the capability
is transparent to end-users. "The biggest value proposition, besides the
amount of work for IT to deploy the software, is that the device user can't
alter or delete a phone call or SMS or Pin message at the device level,"
he said.
Retain for BlackBerry costs 40 percent as much as an enterprise pays for its
BES server, so users can take advantage of discounts that they may have realized
when buying their BES, such as volume processing.
