In Focus: Two New Products Aim at Enterprisewide RetentionIn Focus: Two New Products Aim at Enterprisewide Retention

Are you ready to consolidate retention silos in favor of an enterprisewide approach? Two recent introductions from leading enterprise content management (ECM) vendors tout a unified and all-encompassing approach to long-term retention, but one is aimed at archiving while the other is focused on records management. Both products address compliance and legal discovery challenges, but the second tackles the complete information lifecycle all the way through to content deletion.

On April 3, storage giant EMC announced two key additions to what is expected to be a complete family of products built on a unified platform for classifying, retaining, migrating, discovering many forms of content and administering those archives. The two new products are EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email and EMC Documentum Archive Services for Reports. They join EMC Documentum Archive Services for SAP, which was introduced last year.

EMC already offers a popular e-mail archiving tool called EmailXtender, which was picked up with the purchase of Legato, but it's a standalone solution. In contrast, Archive Services for Email is part of a larger platform that will (eventually) address all forms of information, including images, documents, records, videos and Web sites. Archive Services for Email archives both incoming and outbound e-mail and attachments, and the product can also administer and discover e-mails within legacy standalone archives, including EmailXtender deployments.

Archive Services for Reports captures large volumes of computer-generated output such as invoices, statements and bills as well as system-generated content from wireless devices, debit cards and Web services. Similarly, Archive Services for SAP archives reports and other documents and data from the top-selling ERP system.

EMC didn't detail plans for future archive services products, but a company spokesperson said the family will grow by year's end and that there is high interest in file systems, unstructured content--read, documents--Microsoft SharePoint and even RFID events.

In the scheme of compliance solutions, archiving is only half the battle. The harder challenge is records management, which sets and enforces policies for declaring the official records of the enterprise as well as for deleting those records in accordance with legal, regulatory, industry and company requirements. Plenty of companies are turning to archiving to retain information that might be deemed relevant in a legal or regulatory matter, but it's a shotgun approach that doesn't distinguish between official records and everything else. And sooner or later, you'll have to resolve the question of when and what to delete.

Stellent is taking on the enterprisewide records management challenge with Universal Records Management, announced March 28. The product lets organizations define, manage and execute record and retention policies for all forms of content--including physical records--and it complies with Department of Defense 5015.2 and .4 guidelines. A key differentiator is the application's agent-based architecture, which lets you enforce records management and retention policies and schedules in native applications and repositories. That means you can leave content in its current location rather than move it to a central repository. Agents also send information back to the Stellent server so it can maintain an up-to-date catalog of all critical enterprise content for legal discovery litigation holds (whether you've declared something as a record or not).

The company says the Universal Records Management open API and agent architecture can be used to integrate any repository or application, but plans call for out-of-the-box agents for third-party products including Symantec Enterprise Vault (for e-mail) and Microsoft SharePoint Server as well as Windows, Unix and Linux file servers.

EMC also offers records management products and capabilities, but you can't blame a company that gets the lion's share of its revenue from storage products for promoting archiving. It's just that saving everything can be dangerous because you keep spending more on storage, creating a bigger discovery and retrieval problem, and avoiding the disposition problems that sound records management policies address.

Stellent's new product is the real deal for records management, yet many enterprises just aren't ready for the people side of that challenge. Technology is part of what's needed, but experienced records managers and compliance officers are a scarce commodity. Then there's the companywide training and discipline required to make such a program real. Stellent and others are attempting to overcome the challenges of classifying content and setting sound, defensible policies, but for many companies the only option (or expedient shortcut, depending on your perspective) is saving everything and deferring the inevitable challenges of escalating storage costs and information disposition.