Innovations in information management technologies: thanks to sweeping new regulations and an investigatory climate in corporations worldwide, fine minds are turning their attention to solving--or at least salving--the difficulties associated with managing electronic records.

• Author: Gable, Julie

At the Core

This article

Examines three products that have records management implications:

* EMC's Centera Compliance Edition

* Princeton Softech's Active Archiving Solutions

* Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal Server version 2.0

Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe; it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown.--Wordsworth

Broad new regulations and an investigatory climate have created lucrative new markets for information management products with records capabilities. "Compliance" has become the mantra of technology sellers and buyers alike, and true innovation is a promise often made but rarely kept. Now and then, however, products emerge that have real implications for the improved creation, distribution, storage, preservation, and disposal of business records. With records managers now commonly invited to share their insights and expertise with eager legal and information technology (IT) departments, it pays to know what is on the horizon for managing the records lifecycle.

Three products represent new approaches to electronic issues and have implications for records managers:

* EMC's Centera Compliance Edition offers storage hardware and a unique software-based method for storing records and their associated metadata so that they remain unalterable and authentic according to predefined retention rules.

* Princeton Softech's Active Archiving Solutions present new capabilities for encapsulating selected portions of structured databases so they can be stored more effectively and retained as part of a company's total records solution, yet remain easily searchable for end users.

* Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server version 2.0 is included as part of Windows Shared Services, and businesses with Microsoft enterprise licenses already have SharePoint available to them. This bundling will likely make Sharepoint a default tool for collaboration, information access, and sharing for some firms. Several companies have developed records management tools for SharePoint.

No one product answers all needs, but each one does represent a new idea or approach. Also, the products showcased are representative; already, other vendors are preparing competitive products around similar ideas. Finally, the products are diverse in their capabilities but share one common factor: All require an underlying procedural foundation of policies, procedures, retention, and classification in order to work effectively--all the building blocks with which records managers are most familiar.

EMC Centera's Content Addressed Storage

Centera Compliance Edition is designed to store fixed content--such as documents, presentations, images, video, and audio files--that are complete, finalized, and not expected to change. Once items are considered records, they pass from the applications used to create them (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) into Centera by way of an application program interface (API) that acts as a conduit between the two systems. For its part, Centera creates a one-of-a-kind digital fingerprint for each record that serves as the address for where the record is stored.

The record's digital fingerprint is a function of two things: the record's content and its metadata. First, Centera uses algorithms to calculate a unique, 128-bit hash of the record's content, a kind of digital claim check. Next, the record's claim check, along with metadata about the record (such as file name, creation date, etc.), are inserted into an extensible markup language (XML) file called a C-Clip descriptor file (CDF). Centera then...