Archive One Offers Integration Framework for Compliance, Enterprise Content Management and System Management Solutions

29th September 2005

C2C’s Archive One division has announced a two-phase roadmap to open up the email archive to a wide variety of business solutions. An Integration Framework and Application Programming Interface (API) will open up the archive processes and repositories to third-party applications and a variety of unstructured data from Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes and SMTP email.

“E-mail archiving is not an island — it has to be open to interrogation from other applications and even submit to wider business needs for compliance and content or records management,” says Dave Hunt, C2C’s CEO. “Archive One repositories hold key information and are driven by policy decisions taken centrally, so the Integration Framework makes archival management seamless to other applications that may choose to interface with it.”

The Integration Framework, available now to selected partners, offers a way for third-party applications to benefit from direct interaction with the archive administration. Customers will gain centralized control and visibility of the email archives as well as reduce potential points of manual administrative failure — key to managing compliance requirements.

The API, available in the next release of Archive One, will open up the archive repositories to applications of unstructured data. Archive One will no longer be an Exchange-only repository; Microsoft Office files, Lotus Notes, SMTP email and anti-spam applications will be able to use Archive One to store and retrieve data via the API.

To start, C2C has developed four types of partnership through the Integration Framework:
1) Enterprise Content Management: These solutions search the email archive for key data in messages and attachments, and can directly amend retention periods in line with policy.
2) Compliance Providers: Solutions driven by the compliance officer can interrogate Archive One for search results, create new archival policies and change retention periods.
3) System Management: To assist with automated system operation, these products can dictate an archiving run and receive results or Achive One can take control of other applications, such as back-up solutions.
4) Value Added Resellers: As part of an archiving service, VARs can interface applications or create scripts to automate management of users (for example, add a new user with a certain profile), or read and write configuration and results data to/from other applications.

The Integration Framework offers 3 methods of interaction:

1) Automation Services for programmatic control of the Archive One engine. It includes the ability to start, stop, schedule and define policies, or to add and remove users.
2) Notification Services allow the user to be notified at various significant points in the archiving process, such as on completion of a run.
3) Open Configuration Formats for the storage of configuration and results data in standard open file formats, such as XML. This allows customers, VARs and application vendors to read and write configuration and results data to/from other applications (for example, to customise a policy configuration from a third party application before running the policy through the automation service).

“Building robust archives that can cope with the huge volumes of email is something only a few specialist solutions like Archive One can provide,” says Ken Hughes, C2C’s CTO. “Our Integration Framework allows Archive One to fit into business systems by enabling it to control or be controlled by such systems. This widens the scope of Archive One to create seamless customer solutions.”

Click here for an architecture view of the Integration Framework and API for Archive One (jpg).

Click here for full briefing notes on Integration Framework.

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