Oracle Getting Deeper Into Records Management

Oracle announced two records management products yesterday at Collaborate 2008: Oracle Universal Online Archive and Oracle E-mail Archive Service. Built with Oracle's ContentDB technology, the Universal Online Archive is a place where enterprises can archive digital documents. ("Online" in the name refers to the fact that it stores digital (online) versus paper (offline) documents, not that it is a SaaS-based service.)

The product interrelationships are as follows. Oracle's Universal Records Management serves as the policy engine; Oracle Universal Online Archive serves as a high-volume repository; Oracle E-mail Archive Service is the archiving interface for getting e-mails from Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes, and SMTP-based mail systems into the Oracle Universal Online Archive. Oracle says that e-mail is the beachhead; it will offer other archiving services over time to make it easier to archive documents from other systems (e.g., Microsoft SharePoint, file servers, production systems).

I'd say there were two interesting tidbits from the pre-briefing I had last week. First, Oracle is mentally splitting content into three buckets: active content (controlled by Universal Content Management), transactional content (controlled by imaging and process management), and historical content (controlled by Universal Online Archive). While I would split it into draft, active, and historical buckets instead, I applaud Oracle's larger view. Too many vendors concentrate on talking about one or the other: active content (content management vendors) or historical content (backup, information lifecycle vendors). At this point, no one talks about draft content (blog and wiki vendors should). Second, Oracle noted that within Oracle, active content (which it defines as having a 30-day life) is a much smaller percentage of documents than that of historical content (which it defines as having a 5-year life). A stat worth keeping in mind from both a security and disk cost point-of-view.