Mobile and Text Messaging

Davi Schmidt:
Hi everyone. And welcome to our Watch It Work series. I'm joined by Ryan Batiuk, senior solutions engineer at Smarsh.

Ryan Batiuk:
Hi, I'm Ryan. Happy to be here with you guys.

Davi Schmidt:
We're here to show you what a modern approach to mobile capture archiving and compliance looks like. Let's go over the agenda. So you know what to expect from us. First, I'll give a brief overview to familiarize everyone with Smarsh.

Davi Schmidt:
Then I'm going to hand it over to Ryan who will discuss solutions to match your mobile strategy. Then you'll go into the demo and go over a scenario, how to search for messages for a discovery request.

Davi Schmidt:
Let's talk about Smarsh. Equipping your employees with the latest and greatest mobile channels is imperative in today's work environment. With Smarsh, you can capture and archive text messages to help your organization stay compliant with regulations and record keeping initiatives. Smarsh offers the only text message archiving solution that works for any combination of device, operating system, carrier plan and ownership model.

Davi Schmidt:
And this includes capturing text messages directly from leading mobile carriers. Smarsh also has a solution for channels like WhatsApp and WeChat so that regulated organizations can capture and store content from these channels in their native format, all within the Smarsh connected archive. Ryan, let's talk about the mobile solutions.

Ryan Batiuk:
Oh yeah. We can jump into the mobile solutions. So, the first scenario is corporate capture. So, this scenario is where your workforce deploys each employee with a corporate issue phone. So, the company owns the phone and the business plan that's associated with it. So, we actually have partnerships with the carriers.

Ryan Batiuk:
All the major U.S carriers, all a bunch of different international ones where we capture the text message directly from the carrier itself. So there's no application to install, very easy to activate and minimal device management. So once you set it on, once you enable the business line for archiving, the text message, the MMS messages, they all just start archiving right from the carrier. The end user doesn't need to really do anything.

Ryan Batiuk:
There's nothing to install on their phone, even if they delete a text message, we still capture it from the carrier. So, it's a great way to have that efficient compliant way to go and collect text messages directly from the carrier. That's the first scenario in a phone type of deployment for your mobile devices for your employees. Let's go over this second scenario. It's BYOD. This is where your employee really just brings their own phone to the work environment.

Ryan Batiuk:
It's not issued by the company. So ,the scenario where having two phones at the same time, that's not really a thing. So they only have one phone, just their own personal phone. So, the solution that we have here is we actually, instead of having the employee get an actual physical phone and plan issue to them, we actually just issue more of a soft phone.

Ryan Batiuk:
So think of their one phone, their one personal phone that they use, is having both phones inside of it. So, they have both their personal side and their business side on one device. So, what the workflow really looks like is you have the employee here getting a text message from a client. It's traveling through the server here. They get a regular notification banner. Like they normally would. It's a true type of soft phone.
Ryan Batiuk:
So it works and operates feels just like any other kind of text message. You can receive phone calls on this, you get a mobile business number assigned to you. So it's an additional phone number assigned to this soft phone. So, they have two phone numbers, both their personal and this new mobile business number assigned to this soft phone. So, they can make phone calls and the client just, it's just another text message, right?

Ryan Batiuk:
It's just another phone number, nothing new for the client. Have the external party has to learn in order to conduct any kind of communication with your employee, right? Everything is very familiar in terms of how they send text messages. So, that's the BYOD scenario out of the two. So, you have corporate issued as well as BYOD. So, let's go over the demo scenario inside the system.

Ryan Batiuk:
This is once the message was archived, and you're trying to produce the message back for a discovery request. Let's say you need to pull messages back. We have great tools. If you need to monitor your employees, we have cues as well, but I'm going to go over just how to run a new search, as well as place that into a discovery case. So let's go and click on new search.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, I'm just trying to find text messages now that have already been sent. So for content, I can choose which content I want. So I can choose AT&T is or Verizon, the major text carriers. Or I could leave it blank and it'll just do all contents. It'll just search across everything that we have in the archive. So, that's even non-mobile.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, if you want to follow conversations as they travel across channels, you can do that also. For people, you can type in a phone number. So, you can type it in as your regular phone number, formatting here, we map names and email addresses with your employees. So, if Jane Smith here is one of your employees, you could search for by her email address, or you can click on the little magnifying glass.

Ryan Batiuk:
And this is, if you have your hierarchy integrated with our system, you could actually search for Jane Smith here, but this is an employee that has a phone number mapped in the system. So, you can see Jane Smith, she has her phone number mapped the 5-7-4 number. So you could just click on Jane and it'll apply all of her different identifiers associated with her.

Ryan Batiuk:
You can just search on the mobile number if you wanted to, or the department. So the group that chains in, you can search on all those different types of areas here, and that's how you can populate the people field using those various methods. You also have keywords here. So, if you want to have any kinds of keywords, you can type them in here. Things like guarantee, or risk or legal. You can easily type these in here.

Ryan Batiuk:
You can type in a phrase, if you have something like, let's say your business works on bridges, or they're involved with some kind of, the disaster for insurance and a bridge went down and you need to, there's some kind of investigation and you need to see, what happened during that point in time. What kind of communications transpired? You can go and search a phrase there. That's where I'm going to search. I'm going to search this proximity type of phrase here.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, bridge within 10 words of down, date range, you can go back in time and just pick which date you want. I'm just going to search the beginning of time, advanced as good. If you want to search by message type, if you want to do certain multimedia messages, direct messages, comments, these are more like instant messages. So social media, so you can search for things like that. Let's go ahead and calculate. We get three results back. So, that seems about the right ballpark. Let's click on search.

Ryan Batiuk:
And we got three results, so we have some email here along with some text message. Email looks like email, right? As you expect from two subject right? Now, the way that we display text messages, and here you can see bridge and down. That's why it got this result here. If we click on this, this is a message from AT&T. So, you can see Katie Baxter here. She's the employee. This is the main message here.

Ryan Batiuk:
So I selected just the one, but it displays the entire thread here. So, you can see all the context of what really transpired in this text message. And that's important, when you're going through and doing discovery on text messages, it's important to have all of your context here. So, you know exactly, what they're talking about. People talk with really shorthand phrases and sentences and texts.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, you really should have all the context. So, you know what went down from start to finish, and the whole thread is here across days, weeks, months. So you can follow it really, really with ease here, and you can collect all of these. These are all important as part of your investigation. You can pull all these in, even if you're doing a review. If you're monitoring your employees for compliance reasons, you can supervise in this kind of way.

Ryan Batiuk:
And we have supervision tools here to go and do that as well. So, lots of great tools here to, for compliance or doing a discovery request on these text messages here. So, I can go and place these messages here, and even non you can do non-text messages too. So, you can take all these messages here and you can say, add these to a case.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, now I'm getting into a legal discovery case. Maybe this is part of my investigation, legal teams might need this, human resources, compliance teams, and I have one here, text message discovery. So I'm placing text messages in here. You can build a new case if you wanted to, and you can place them into a new case on the fly, but I have one ready to go and I can add these messages here.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, it's adding those in there. And then I can go over to my cases area. These are all of my active cases. So I'll go down to my text message, discover, where is it? There we go, text message discovery request case here. You can click on the little configuration area. You can share this case. As long as people have the right permissions, you can build special roles for them.

Ryan Batiuk:
You can collaborate. This is how you would collaborate really. You can share the case out with multiple individuals. So they can go and log in and view the contents that were in this data collection or this case. You can apply a hold. So, if you have retention just for certain messages, let's say you have 90 day retention, a year retention. And this is a long investigation.

Ryan Batiuk:
You can apply a hold for just these messages that are placed inside this case. So, I've loaded data into here, maybe other people have too. You can actually go and explore the contents in the case, and this will give you a nice filtering panel. On the left hand side, you can see exactly what types of data are in here. You can type in words so you can filter things down.

Ryan Batiuk:
Maybe the word risk, maybe this isn't important. This isn't part of the investigation. You want to make sure that you only have the refined, solid set of data that you want to provide to the person requesting it. If you're handing this off to outside counsel afterwards, you can do that too. So here's the word risk, and you can of course view it like you saw earlier, and you'll get that same threading throughout the system here. So you'll see inline images are here.

Ryan Batiuk:
You can keep loading the beginning of the thread to again, see exactly how the conversation went down. This goes all the way from December 21st, 2016, all the way to January 2017. So this conversation will just keep on going. It's the same thread with Martha Johansson and this and this external user here. You can use the tools on right hand side.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, you could either remove this message. You can add additional metadata, like additional tags. You can mark things for responsiveness or for privilege, legal teams would be doing this often outside councils. You can share the case with outside council, have them collaborate on it. You can add additional notes, you can filter, buy your tags. So, if you went and marked items for responsiveness or for privilege, you can go and filter by that.

Ryan Batiuk:
You can search by people, date to different tags here. So, really easy ways to go and call down your data, to get the right set of items that you need for the fulfillment of your request. When you're all done, you might want to serve it to who's ever asking for it. So, I can go over and click on export for my case.

Ryan Batiuk:
I can transform it. The various formats here, email PST, NSF, or native here. I can put a password on it, I can have the delivery method go in app. So, that'll show up on the right hand side, so you can download it right from the portal, or you can fire it off to another discovery tool. So if you have another tool, you can set an SFTP destination to that tool. And the data goes right off over there.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, very easy to integrate with other tools that you might have and do further analysis that you might need to do. So, great ways to do that kind of first hand pass and take, do extensive searching, finding what you need, getting it out to either to fulfill the person who's requesting it, or get into another system that you might need it for, but great, great tools to run a search for messages to fulfill a discovery request.
Davi Schmidt:
Awesome. Thanks for walking us through all of that. I have a couple of questions. What can I do about my employees who want to send messages over WhatsApp or WeChat?

Ryan Batiuk:
Well, your employees are in luck because we capture WhatsApp also. So, very popular communications app for U.S Citizens, but mostly international. They really like it internationally. So, maybe you do business on a global scale. They only want to talk to you over WhatsApp. There's no, it's like a non-starter, they don't even want to talk to you through regular SMS. So, we try to support as many channels as possible.

Ryan Batiuk:
So let's go over. I can show you what some WhatsApp messages look like. So, I'll just run a quick search for WhatsApp here. So, it's great to enable both. So, have your text messages cover as well as your WhatsApp and you can easily see what text message coming from a carrier and what's a WhatsApp.
Ryan Batiuk:
So, you can put that in [inaudible 00:19:24] , right? It is a very funny name for an app, WhatsApp.

Davi Schmidt:
Yes.

Ryan Batiuk:
So, I'll run a search here and we have some policies set and I'll just do anything, any WhatsApp message that hit a policy. So I have like lexicon keywords and it can flag on certain words if it so happens to hit it. So, let's go and run a search for WhatsApp and we'll get one message back. Perfect. So again, enable your workforce or the word compliance. So here, so if I click on this, you'll see this is a WhatsApp message.

Ryan Batiuk:
You can see when Smarsh started archiving, you can see when people join the conversations, gifts or animations or videos, audio, clips that you sent to each other, those all capture attachments, PDFs that you might share. You can see when people leave the chat. So, it's a great form of capture for WhatsApp, and it's a great way to enable your workforce to not be restricted, because what a lot of customers are now, they're WhatsApp because they can't capture it.

Ryan Batiuk:
Enable it, let your workforce use WhatsApp also, alongside regular text messaging. So they're not trying to get around the system and you can stay compliant with capturing text messages as well as types of WhatsApp messages.

Davi Schmidt:
Thank you for joining us and thank you, Ryan for walking us through everything. If any of this has peaked your interest, and you'd like more information or a more in depth conversation about how Smarsh can accommodate your particular environment. We have a team of extremely knowledgeable folks that would love to walk you through that. Also feel email us at advantage@smarsh.com with any additional questions or comments, so thanks again for attending.

Ryan Batiuk:
Awesome. Thanks guys, so much. Take care.