Open Letter to Obama

This press release/open letter came over the wire today. It's a clever way to get attention, but its premise is all wrong.

Experts say Obama should not use email bc the messages could become public record and could embarrass the new president or otherwise give him legal headaches.

This Torrance company's open letter goes the wrong direction, logically, and says Obama should use email because he can easily store the messages with this company's service. Here's the "open letter" to Obama:

An Open Letter to President-Elect Barack Obama From LiveOffice

TORRANCE, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 11/25/08 -- LiveOffice, the leading
provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) email archiving solutions, today issued the
following open letter to President-elect Barack Obama, urging him to add another
"first" to his record by becoming the first emailing president:

Dear President-elect Obama:

As the New York Times reported recently, you've got a problem -- your email. Experts
(and according to the story, even your advisors) say that the Presidential Records Act
makes it too risky for you to keep emailing and using your trusty BlackBerry once you
take office. But you built your campaign platform around the idea of change, and we say
it's time to buck the trend and turn you into an emailing, BlackBerry'ing
commander-in-chief. We're confident it can be done.

"How?" you ask. What you need is an email archiving system that securely captures all
the messages you send and receive and preserves them in their original format. It can
even handle email messages you send from your BlackBerry. Plus, if you opt for a
software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, you can be up and running in just a few days
(and you'll never even notice a difference in your email).

As the first emailing president, an email archiving solution can help you:
-- Increase the transparency of your administration (which you've said is a top
priority)

-- Prevent the risk of lost messages (and the subsequent bad PR -- as we saw when the
Bush administration lost "potentially millions" of messages)

-- Benefit from the efficiencies of email while protecting your messages in a highly
secure environment

As the developer of one of the first cloud-based email archiving solutions, we can tell
you from firsthand experience that being the first to do something is always buzz
worthy--and a solid email archiving system can make you the first emailing president.
That's our platform, and we're sticking to it.

Respectfully,

Your Friends at LiveOffice