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Planning for IM compliance
About IM compliance
Many industries require that instant messages adhere to the same regulatory compliance guidelines as are all other business records. To comply with these regulations, your system must log and archive all business records, and the archived records must be retrievable.
The Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM and Presence Service provides support for instant messaging (IM) compliance by collecting data for the following IM activities in single cluster, intercluster, or federated network configurations:
IM compliance components
IM compliance includes these components:
- IM and Presence Service Release 9.0(1). IM and Presence uses the Message Archiver component for logging messages to the external database.
- External database—For information on supported external databases, see the Database Setup Guide for IM and Presence.
- IM Client—Supported clients include Cisco clients such as Cisco Jabber; third-party XMPP clients, and other third-party clients used in federated networks.
Note
The IM compliance provides a basic IM logging solution. If you require a more granular logging solution, for example logging based on policy, use the third-party compliance solution, see the appendix module for details.
Sample topologies and message flow for IM compliance
Note
The external database requirements defined in this section depend on the capacity of your servers.
IM compliance provides logging of all compliance related data to an external database. All IM traffic passes through the IM and Presence Server (via the Message Archiver component) and is simultaneously logged to the external database. Each IM log contains the sender and recipient information, the timestamp, and the message body.
For ad-hoc group chat messages, by default IM and Presence logs multiple copies of the same message to the external database, one copy for each recipient. This identifies what users in the ad-hoc group chat received the message.
Depending on the XMPP client you deploy, you may also notice this behavior:
- IM and Presence may log an incoming message to the external database twice. This occurs because some XMPP clients do not support the ability to learn the full JID, or address, of the other party in the conversation. Consequently the XMPP client forks the message to all active clients for the user (all clients that the user is currently signed into), and IM and Presence then logs all forked messages to the external database.
- IM and Presence may log the first message in a chat to the external database twice. This occurs until the XMPP client learns the full JID, or address, of the other party in the conversation.
If IM and Presence loses its connection to the external database, it continues to send and deliver IMs to users, and users can still create (ad-hoc) chat rooms. However with no connection to the external database, IM and Presence does not log any of these IMs so it does not support permanent group chat. IM and Presence raises an alarm if the connection to the external database is lost.
Single Cluster Configuration
When using IM compliance in a single cluster, we highly recommend that you deploy one external database per cluster to which all incoming messages sent to users in the cluster are logged.
The image below highlights these components and message flow. By default IM compliance logs inbound messages to the external database, however you can configure the feature to also log outgoing messages.
Intercluster or Federated Network Configuration
When using IM compliance in an intercluster or federated network configuration, you must configure an external database per cluster. Additionally, you should configure the IM and Presence server to log both incoming and outgoing messages. Otherwise, each database will retain only half of the conversation.
The figure below highlights these components and message flow.
Prerequisite configuration tasks
Before you use this guide to configure IM compliance, make sure that you have performed the following tasks:
- Install the IM and Presence servers as described in the Installing Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
- Configure the IM and Presence servers as described in the Deployment Guide for IM and Presence Service on Cisco Unified Communications Manager .
- Set up the external database as described in the Database Setup for IM and Presence Service on Cisco Unified Communications Manager .
Support for PostgreSQL 9.1.1
To deploy PostgreSQL version 9.1.1 as the external database, you must set the following values in the postgresql.conf file:
After you configure these parameters, you must restart PostgreSQL. For more information about how to configure the postgresql.conf file and restart PostgreSQL, see the Database Setup for IM and Presence Service on Cisco Unified Communications Manager .
