Companies struggling to control vast amounts of documents

for compliance, or even litigation purposes, may be interested in the latest partnership
designed to deal specifically with these issues.

This time the partnership is between open source Enterprise Content Management vendor
Alfresco (news, site) and document management software provider Rational Retention
(RR).

The result is a system that will automate the management of both structured and
unstructured data from across an entire ECM that may be needed for drawn-out
compliance and litigation proceedings.

Legal Costs Cut With ECM

As it stands, in many litigation or compliance hearings the ability of a company to
provide the required data quickly, efficiently and in its entirety will be reflected in the
costs associated with such a hearing.

The quicker the process is completed, the less a company will pay out. And with the
increasing costs of pursing such cases through legal process, many companies are turning
to enterprise content management systems to manage documents life-cycles.

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By managing that life cycle companies can save, by some estimates, up to 50% of the
costs of eDiscovery and regulatory compliance.

This new partnership sees the implementation of a new system that will connect Rational
Retention’s end-to-end solution for managing the entire lifecycle of data with Alfresco’s
centralized content repository.

Easy Document Archiving

In effect, it will allow users to archive e-mails, documents and enterprise content that
needs to be retained for whatever reasons, legal or otherwise.

Rational Retention’s solution provides end-to-end management of documents by

providing life-logs of all documents in the systems. In doing so, the solution prevents
tampering with the document unintentionally or maliciously.
Documents from third-parties outside the network can also be imported into the system
using a simple upload wizard and after analysis, will be classified, stamped and exported
to any industry-standard e-format.

There is also an automatic destruct feature once the user has deemed the document life-
cycle at an end.

Using the Alfresco Content Repository

For its part, Alfresco brings with it its Common Interface File System and WebDav
protocols. This means that content can be migrated to the Alfresco’s document and
records management tools where it is stored from just about anywhere.

There are also a number of other functions built into the system that follow guidelines set
out by regulators including eDiscovery for investigations, metadata collection that allows
easy document organization and recall on tagged documents.

Document Lifecycle Management on an Enterprise

Scale
What this product does is offer a single system that provides auto-classification,
integrated review and production of documents with enterprise scalability.

While neither Alfresco nor Rational Retention claim to be offering something that cannot
be done elsewhere, they do say that because it leverages Alfresco open source ECM, it
will be considerably cheaper than other solutions.

Available now to select customers, the solution will become publicly available sometime
this quarter. Until then, you can learn more with a webinar on May 12.