PORTLAND, Oregon, August 4, 2015 – Smarsh®, the leading provider of cloud-based comprehensive archiving solutions for compliance and e-discovery, today announced enhanced archiving support for electronic communications within Microsoft Office 365 environments. The Archiving Platform™ from Smarsh helps highly regulated companies and those that deal with audits, examinations and litigation to deploy the popular online communications and collaboration service with more confidence, knowing they have a solution in place for compliance and discovery events.

The business world is moving to cloud-based office productivity platforms, including  Office 365, for the benefits of reduced operating costs, easier IT management and better workplace collaboration. According to an Osterman Research report, The Role of Third-Party Tools for Office 365 Compliance, Office 365/Exchange Online adoption is expected to more than double by mid-2017.

“Office 365 is arguably the most successful of the various business-grade, cloud-based communication and collaboration services currently available,” said Michael Osterman, president and founder of Osterman Research.

However, while Office 365 includes native email archiving capabilities, it may not provide a sufficient retention and oversight solution for some companies in regulated and litigious corporate environments. Companies within these environments are often required to perform regular supervision and/or quickly produce electronic communications records including email, instant messaging and social media for legal or regulatory compliance.

“Compliance-related issues, whether driven by statutory regulations or legal requirements, are an essential consideration for companies across a wide range of industries,” said Osterman. “Even though Office 365 has many useful features and functions and addresses some compliance issues well, it has a number of limitations. Organizations that encounter these limitations will need to use third-party compliance capabilities to fully satisfy their regulatory and legal obligations.”

By combining the powerful compliance and discovery capabilities of The Archiving Platform™ from Smarsh with Microsoft Office 365, companies can meet their specific regulatory compliance, legal, corporate or government records retention requirements, such as the need to exercise granular control over retention policies and legal holds, retain various types of communication for different lengths of time, and produce authentic, immutable records of communication to meet specific compliance or legal criteria. The Archiving Platform captures all Microsoft Office 365 email, Yammer content, and Skype for Business Online (formerly Lync) messaging and retains it in a single location for fast and easy search, review and production.

In addition, Smarsh offers the new Personal Archive, an add-on module to The Archiving Platform that can give Microsoft Office 365 users fast and easy self-service access to their own archived email and content from their desktops, laptops, or mobile devices.

Companies can also use The Archiving Platform to archive and supervise a broad range of content outside of those included in the Office 365 platform, such as instant and text messages, web, video, and various social media channels.

“Companies that use The Archiving Platform with their Office 365 environments also benefit from the ability to retain and supervise all of their electronic communications in a single cloud-based comprehensive archiving platform, not just Microsoft content,” said Stephen Marsh, CEO and founder of Smarsh. “As a result, businesses can use a comprehensive archive with purpose-built compliance and risk-management tools to easily search, supervise and produce communications content of any type in one place.”

To learn more about the benefits of using The Archiving Platform with Office 365, sign up to attend the Smarsh webinar, ‘Solving Compliance Issues for Office 365/Exchange Online Environments.’

About Smarsh (www.smarsh.com)

Smarsh® delivers cloud-based comprehensive archiving solutions for the information-driven enterprise. Its centralized platform provides a unified compliance and e-discovery workflow across the entire range of digital communications, including email, public and enterprise social media, websites, instant messaging and mobile messaging. Founded in 2001, Smarsh helps more than 20,000 organizations meet regulatory compliance, e-discovery and record retention requirements. The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon with offices in New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles and London.