Being ready to email, faxes, voice mail, instant messages, and whatever other forms of electronically stored information (ESI) in response to regulatory audits, e-discovery requests and other corporate governance requests is already a challenge for many businesses. But are you ready to do the same for the text messages your employees send?

To help companies capture, archive and retrieve these text message communications Smarsh Inc., has added the Mobile Message Archiving module to its Smarsh Messaging Archive Suite, in partnership with TextGuard.

Smarsh currently supports electronic communications archiving for email, instant messaging, and social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The new Mobile Message Archiving module is for SMS text messages, BlackBerry PIN-to-PIN communication and BlackBerry Messenger content, and supports BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile operating systems, with iPhone support anticipated later in 2010.

According to Sam Kolbert-Hyle, Smarsh VP/Business Development & Strategic Initiatives at Smarsh, the Text Messaging Module puts "listening agent" on each device, capturing the data and sending it to the archive, so when it's received, it's been indexed, and is searchable in a compliant manner. "For these messages, we also capture and archive all associated data, like the phone number, time, message content, who it was sent from and to, and the email address and name associated with the device," says Kolbert-Hyle. According to the company, messages and associated data can be written to tamper-proof media, to satisfy industry or federal regulations.

According to Kolbert-Hyle, "This is good for all companies in heavily regulated industries, like finance and medical, as well as small-to-midsize businesses, as well as educational organizations."

In addition to satisfying compliance regulations, capturing and archiving mobile messages using the Smarsh tool lets a company enforce corporate policies that govern employee use of text messaging. The archived data also lets companies recover data that was on lost or stolen mobile devices. And, because messaging activity satisfies regulatory requirements, employees can use text messaging -- in appropriate, authorized ways -- where previously it would have been prohibited.

Smarsh's tools can be deployed either at the device or server level. "SMBs who use Blackberries may not have the Blackberry Enterprise Server," Kolbert-Hyle. "We can support small firms as well as large ones. And our module listens to SMS-ing inter-carrier."

The Smarsh Mobile Message Archiving module is available as either a standalone product or as an additional module to Smarsh's Archiving Suite. Pricing is based on the number of devices whose text messages are archived.