Is it common to want to keep all that history? My understanding was it's best practice to delete chats after a certain period to limit the surface area of any potential legal discovery.
For a lot of industries, deleting internal communication is illegal. For any publicly traded company in the US, all internal communication needs to be archived for five years.
And it's equally emphasized, at many of those organizations, that all communication older than 5 years is deleted. Nobody wants to be burned by an ill-considered statement made in a decade-old IM conversation.
Do you have a source for this? I couldn't find anything regarding the 5 year time frame. I did find [0] which references a few different retention periods, especially at 7 years.
It's part of SOX. It actually requires the data be unencrypted, immutable, and available offline. Most corporations (large and small) do not follow this for email, messaging, wikis and many other services.
