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If you have been following any of the blogs or tweets about Enterprise 2.0 you are probably sick of hearing about how E2.0 is part of a culture shift, a consumer driven phenomenon fueled both by the unprecedented ascent of Web 2.0 tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and the Millennial generation which eschews channel controlled communication like e-mail in favor of open communication channels. What isn’t being discussed — and seems to be specifically ignored — is the fact that all of these new tools will be creating new content, content that will need to be managed and either preserved or disposed.

I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and had an opportunity to speak with vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Socialtext, Jive and others. Most of them were completely caught off guard when I shifted the conversation away from the product functionality and began asking questions about how to apply records management policies or litigation holds to the content in their systems. The best answer I got from a vendor was that the data could be pulled from their system and archived elsewhere. Some vendors admitted that the data couldn’t be removed to comply with RM policies; it was kept in the system forever. When questioned on e-discovery, a product manager for Lotus Live gave a response which would have made Mark Zuckerberg proud: users will act compliantly in an open system because everyone can see everything, which wasn’t the case with e-mail. Litigation won’t be an issue in Enterprise 2.0. (This was following a demo of their product that included a contract negotiation.)

Perhaps the reason E2.0 vendors feel they don’t have to address records management and discovery concerns is that thought leaders like Andrew McAfee and JP Rangaswami have framed it as a non-issue, a red herring that prevents social collaboration from taking root in an organization. But this philosophy seems to be following the same naive reasoning that has caused Facebook so much heartache around privacy: people want to share, when they share in the open it will be beneficial for everyone. Microsoft and IBM should know better. Their current portfolios already deal with discovery and records management. It is common knowledge that corporate litigation departments already spends a large percentage of their e-discovery efforts on e-mail and SharePoint. And, a recent article published on CMS Wire cites that two-thirds of companies are concerned about the relationship between e-Discovery and the proliferation of content on social media sites. If clients are concerned about these issues why aren’t the vendors?

There is no doubt that Enterprise 2.0 tools will continue to be implemented. But, project teams need to consider how they will handle litigation matters. We’ve learned that a best practice for Enterprise 1.0 was to have cross-functional teams representing the Line of Business, Legal, IT, and Records to set expectations from the beginning. E2.0 projects can save themselves some heartache in the long run by continuing that practice. They also need to be asking their solution providers hard questions about how their records management and e-discovery strategies can be applied to the content that will be held in those systems.