Microsoft Corp's complicated unified communications product roadmap, unveiled with much fanfare recently, is missing an important component: regulatory compliance tools for VoIP and instant messaging, according to Avanade Inc, an Accenture-Microsoft joint venture.
There currently are no compliance regulations for instant messaging and IP phone calls. But as these technologies become centrally managed, as Microsoft's forthcoming platform promises to do, enterprises can expect potential compliance issues, Avanade said.

"We are already seeing issues about legal departments have more restrictions around email, yet excluding voice and IM," said Larry LeSueur, VP of Avanade's infrastructure practice.

The mostly likely scenario for digital communications compliance complications would be when a company has a legal subpoena against it -- an increasingly common occurrence with intellectual property suits, for example.

As LeSueur pointed out, legal departments already work with IT departments on getting emails during the legal discovery period of a lawsuit. Throw VoIP and instant messaging into the mix and IT managers will need new tools to respond to subpoena requests, LeSueur said.

"Now that you bring voice messaging, potentially instant messaging into an archive, how does that fit under the legal model that needs access for discovery?" he said.

Avanade, which sells integration services for Microsoft enterprise platforms but does not conduct regulatory audits, believes that while unified communications will have a "positive impact from a pure IT standpoint," these governance issues will need to be worked out in the marketplace, LeSueur said.

"There are pockets of groups working on such tools ... around individual pieces of these technologies," LeSueur said. "But there's definitely a need for a more collective set of these tools that could go across the broader platform."

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