E-mail and blog monitors are launched

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. -- Between Sarbanes-Oxley and sexual harassment suits, the enterprise is more concerned than ever about what its employees say or send in e-mails and blogs.

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During the Demo@15 conference on Monday afternoon, three companies unveiled products that monitor messages to detect anything from inappropriate language to sending out proprietary corporate data.

WhatCounts demonstrated BlogUnit Series, a 1U hardware device plus software that manages corporate blogs before they are published. The blog software is centrally controlled and can be linked to both LDAP and Radius servers to control approvals before publishing, content viewing, and broadcasting.

Versioning and workflow control also allows content managers to roll back to previous versions of a post and maintain an audit trail of all versions.

BlogUnit will be available March 1, priced at around $10,000.

Since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, archiving e-mails has also become almost a requirement for any publicly traded company.

Fortiva introduced its Fortiva Archiving and Compliance Suite. The e-mail archiving service is a so-called hybrid solution. The hosted service also includes a behind-the-firewall appliance to capture and encrypt e-mails before they are sent to the Fortiva online service. Users may define their own archiving retention policies using a Web interface.

However, the system also allows managers to create policies that monitor for compliance with any number of corporate polices such as no personal e-mails or sending of sensitive corporate data.

While the system does not stop e-mails, it reports and flags all e-mails that violate policy and give each e-mail a pass or fail rating.

The service and appliance are available now.

A unique e-mail watcher from InBoxer gives the corporate end-user a chance to correct any errors in judgment before an e-mail is actually sent.

The OutBoxer software sits on each local computer and scans messages for compliance with corporate policy. OutBoxer will also read attachments.

According to Roger Matus, founder and CEO, OutBoxer works like a spell checker. If the scanner finds language or material unsuitable for sending, an alert is sent to the creator of the message allowing them to correct it before it is sent.

OutBoxer uses natural language understanding to analyze e-mails at a deeper level than just finding keywords, said Matus.

OutBox will ship in the third quarter.