Federal business moved into Teams, Slack, texts, and meeting chats. Under the Federal Records Act those messages are records, but chat platforms are built to forget them. Feith captures every surface with full fidelity and governs it on your schedule.
Captures Teams, Slack, Zoom, Webex, Google Chat, social, SMS, and encrypted apps, all governed in RMA iQ.
Agencies adopted Teams, Slack, and texting faster than their records programs could follow. The Federal Records Act didn't change. A message that documents agency business is a record, on whatever app it was sent. The gap between where work happens and where records are kept is the exposure.
The Federal Records Act already covers chat. What fails is the machinery: records tools were built for documents and email, and chat has five structural properties none of them were designed to hold.
Messages edit, unsend, and auto-expire. Native retention often deletes by default, and a user can revise or remove a message after it is read.
A record is fixed the moment it is created. Feith captures each message, and every edit and deletion, with a tombstone and version history, before the platform can rewrite it.
One decision spans a Teams thread, a follow-up text, a Slack DM, and a line in a meeting chat. No single platform holds the whole exchange.
Records from every surface land in one file plan and correlate into a single case, so the full decision trail survives even when it was scattered across apps.
A flat message export loses what gives it meaning: who was in the thread, what it replied to, reactions, mentions, and the channel it lived in.
Capture preserves the full envelope (participants and roles, thread and reply structure, reactions, mentions, attachments, and channel context) as durable metadata.
Business migrates to Signal, WhatsApp, and personal texting: unmanaged apps where agency records accumulate with no capture at all.
Where the agency authorizes it, encrypted and mobile surfaces are captured through compliant archiving partners and MDM, bringing off-channel business back into the file plan.
Millions of messages, and only a fraction are records. Capture everything and you bury records officers; capture nothing and you lose the ones that matter.
Capstone-by-role capture plus AI triage separate transitory chatter from records. The right messages are retained on schedule; the rest expire on theirs.
Each surface is captured through its own native, supported interface: no scraping, no screenshots. Every connector respects the platform's permissions and lands records in RMA iQ with NARA metadata populated on intake.
Capture for encrypted and personal-device surfaces is governed by agency policy and authorization. Feith captures what your authority to operate and acceptable-use policy permit, nothing more.
How the capture layer works ›Capturing employee messages, especially texts and encrypted apps, raises a fair question. The answer is scope: Feith captures the records an agency must keep, within the boundary the agency sets, and proves it captured nothing more.
Feith captures only the surfaces and accounts your acceptable-use policy and authority to operate permit. Personal devices and encrypted apps are in scope only where the agency explicitly authorizes it.
Capstone-by-role and content-based capture target the records of agency business. Transitory chatter expires on its own schedule, and capture stays scoped to mission records, leaving routine personal messages alone.
Who captured what, when, and under which policy is logged immutably. The capture program is held to the same accountability as the records it produces.
Capturing the text is the easy part. The work is preserving everything that makes a message defensible: who said it, what it answered, how it changed, and the proof that none of it was altered after capture.
The messages still live in Teams. The record (the full exchange, every version, the participants and their roles, the classification, the retention schedule, and the cryptographic proof of integrity) lives in Feith. That is the difference between an export and a record.
These six capabilities, the same engine that governs your email, documents, and case files, turn captured chat into records you can classify, retain, find, produce, and defend.
Webhook and event subscriptions capture messages in near real time, within seconds of being sent, so edits and deletions are preserved as versions. The record outlasts the message.
Apply the NARA Capstone approach (comprehensive capture for senior-official accounts, role-based policy for everyone else) or capture in full where the mission requires it. The model is yours to set per source.
CUI categories, sensitivity, and agency markings are applied to messages and threads on intake. AI suggests a classification; a reviewer approves it. Sensitive conversations are confined by policy, not folder convention.
Captured chat inherits the agency file plan. Time- and event-based triggers apply; transitory chatter expires, records persist, and disposition runs through the same multi-stage approval as every other record.
Search every surface at once, by participant, date, thread, or content. Place legal holds that span platforms. Produce conversation records with their full context for litigation and FOIA response.
Every captured message is hashed and sealed. The audit trail is immutable and reproducible: who captured what, when, and the cryptographic proof that the record is exactly as it was when it entered the system.
RMA iQ is DoDM 8180.01–aligned and FedRAMP authorized (JITC-tested under the legacy DoD 5015.02-STD). Access is evaluated per request (ABAC and RBAC). Chat records are governed by the same engine and the same controls as every other record.
The engine behind this: RMA iQ ›Chat records are clearly regulated. Four authorities already define the obligation. The only question is whether your program can meet it on the surfaces where work now happens.
Talk to a federal records engineer about which chat surfaces your agency runs, where the capture gaps are, and the RMA iQ configuration that closes them. The conversation starts with your current schedule and the apps your people actually use.
An engineer will respond within one business day, with questions about your current schedule, the chat surfaces your agency runs, and where capture is missing today. Look for an email from a Feith records engineer, a real person on the records team.
