Some enterprises do indeed want to apply retention policies to employee tweets.

EntropySoft, a content integration and migration vendor, has released a new connector for Twitter. EntropySoft already has a set of connectors that get OEM'ed into various packaged content and document management systems, many of which we cover in our evaluation reports.

This new connector enables enterprises to access content (tweets and other information) stored in Twitter. EntropySoft says the primary objective here is to archive those tweets in a corporate archiving system. Once the Twitter content is in one of your own repositories, you can do pretty much anything that the target system allows you to do -- such as declaring tweets as records and applying retention policies on them.

Many organizations have been experimenting with various alternatives for managing their employees' tweets. Some enterprises, for example, employ their Web Content Management system or a Portal-type application as a tweeting interface, so that they can subsequently manage those tweets as content in their larger application. By using a connector-based approach, in contrast, employees can tweet using any of their favorite tools but those tweets can still be brought back into an internal system for subsequent management.

There are some challenges that you'd need to address with the latter model, though. Besides the practicality of considering tweets and more generally social content as records, there are also issues of ownership and legality related to extraction of tweets from Twitter and archiving these in your own systems.

In any case, the ability to access social content via such tools has many uses. Many of the products we cover in our various reports -- such as Document Management and ECM tools like Alfresco and EMC Documentum as well as search engines like Endeca and Exalead -- turn to with EntropySoft to supply connectors within their products. We don't know yet if they plan to use this new Twitter connector too but if and when they start using it, it could become marginally easier to search, index, and archive social content from within your existing systems.