Parlano Builds Ethical Walls, Compliance Adaptors for Its Hosted Group Chat Software

Two things that are sometimes at odds: the need for investment bankers, traders, research analysts and others to share information about deals, companies, markets etc., and the need for Chinese Walls that prevent information from being inappropriately shared among different sides of the business.

Enter Parlano's announcement today at the SIFMA show that its MindAlign persistent group chat product, which runs on Microsoft Live Communications Server and provides secure chat rooms for specific topics, now has pre-built integrations with compliance solutions that enforce e-communications rules and policies including archival. "Our customers used to have to write code and an interface to layer compliance and archival products on MindAlign," says Jeff Schultz, vice president of Parlano. "We've done the integration and the XML mapping for them." XML transformation takes care of one of the trickiest aspects of data integration - defining common tagging and data formats that allow data to be shared. The adaptors announced today link to compliance software from Akonix, Assentor and Facetime. Parlano plans to announce additional pre-packaged compliance adapters in the near future.Parlano also announced today the ability to enforce "ethical walls" that prevent group chat between parties with conflicts of interest, such as energy traders and energy producers, or equity traders and mergers-and-acquisition professionals. The feature uses pre-defined "channel categories" that determine channel membership from Microsoft Active Directory domains, organizational units, and/or groups.

Yesterday, Parlano announced a partnership with mindSHIFT to provide federated group chat, so that outsiders such as partners and lawyers and such can participate in a company's group chat.