On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court's new rules on tracking e-mails and IMs went into effect. We've already had a number of people asking about the archiving features (nice to have the government help your sales efforts ).

For most companies, this likely just means an audit of their existing IT systems for capturing information and an acknowledgment of the risks (like people IM'ing using a public system over a web-based client). And that if they ever are in a lawsuit, they will be asked to turn over the IMs as part of the discovery process.

It seems like a reasonable step, but there is likely going to be a lot of headaches, process and cultural change...and likely some revolt by employees. I doubt it will last long though. When companies started archiving email, it was like banning smoking in restaurants -- a few painful months, and then back to business.