INFORMATION LIFECYCLE

Cures For the Email Quagmire

by Julie Gable

The content of your company's email archives contains: a) a smoking gun that would be damaging should it appear in the press; b) critical evidence to support your legal claims; c) knowledge assets useful for product development. The correct answer is probably all three.

Products that archive email typically focus on its exponential growth in volume, noting that storage and administration are expensive, cumbersome chores best handled as efficiently as possible. Email archiving products assume that all email is created equal, a generalization that works if the email tends to be of one type within a single industry - for example, brokerage firm customer correspondence that the SEC requires to be kept for six years.

Storing messages, while helpful, addresses a single dimension of a more complex issue. Managing email is difficult because its content - message and attachments - is varied. An invitation to lunch does not carry the same weight as a capsule summary of a compound's stability at high temperatures. The first difficulty is determining what to keep and what to throw away; the second challenge is devising some way to sort emails into categories for later preservation or destruction. Two new products, each with its own approach, merit closer looks.

TrueArc for MS Exchange takes the approach that email can be classified automatically as it is received or generated. TrueArc uses ArcIQ, an integration of Autonomy's auto-classification technology, to sort messages into predefined categories. ArcIQ "learns" the correct classification for a message or attachment after digesting a sample set for each category. Records retention periods, i.e., legal, fiscal or operational requirements, are associated with each category. The result is a system that archives email but also recognizes that different message content requires different management. Formerly known as Provenance Systems, TrueArc, Arlington, VA, also markets ForeMost, a records management software product.

Tarian Software's approach to retention - keeping what is legally required or relevant to business functions - is to add this functionality to popular applications, including email. Tarian's e-Records Engine provides an API, a data access layer, an administration/ infrastructure client and an optional email connector for MS Outlook Web Access. In Tarian's model, the host application - whether email, word processing or other software - communicates with the Tarian engine via COM or SOAP protocols using XML. The engine itself resides on a Windows 2000 server.

Bruce Miller, the founder of McLean, VA-based Tarian (and a founder of Provenance as well), believes that e-records management will be an embedded, standard feature of host applications within the next 24 months, making third-party records management software obsolete.

By one estimate, the world will have to cope with 9.2 trillion emails per year by 2005. Creative solutions for filtering meaningful content, storing the useful and expunging the unnecessary will command attention for some time to come.

Julie Gable (juliegable@aol.com) CDIA, LIT, is an independent consultant based in Philadelphia.