As a growing number of companies use social media sites to communicate with their end user customers, an equally growing number of companies are running into compliance issues related to those social media communications. But the latest version of Symantec Enterprise Vault aims to help companies make sure their social media interactions stay on the right side of the law.

Enterprise Vault 10 includes the ability for companies to archive all their social media interactions for compliance and eDiscovery purposes – a practice made necessary as more companies post blogs on their corporate sites and use sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to disseminate corporate information. The government considers those posts as business communications that must be preserved to comply with open records requests, industry regulations and eDiscovery requests.

Also included in version 10 is Symantec’s data loss prevention technology to analyze Microsoft Exchange e-mail content and metadata to help companies determine their archiving and retention strategy for all their messages. Enterprise Vault automatically classifies and assigns the appropriate archiving and retention policy for all of the e-mail content and metadata, including flagging certain content for review for compliance reasons.

Helping expand Enterprise Vault beyond its former boundaries is technology Symantec gained through its recent acquisition of legal discovery solutions provider Clearwell Systems. Clearwell’s eDiscovery Platform complements Enterprise Vault’s ability to capture information, tag specific records for future litigation and quickly search those records for relevant records by enabling customers to process, analyze and review those records for internal audits, legal eDiscovery and corporate governance.

Compliance continues to be a major pain point for certain verticals including financial and health care, but no company is immune to the rules and regulations imposed by the government. Resellers working in compliance-heavy markets may find Symantec’s latest solution is a salve that helps take away at least some of the hurt in adhering to these regulations.