Software indicates when to discard information

Start-up PSS Systems this week is expected to unveil software designed to help companies automate decisions about which documents need to be saved and which can be tossed.

The company's Atlas Information Policy Management (Atlas IPM ) suite looks to help companies create and manage policies for document retention, disposal, preservation and production. Once a company configures its policies, Atlas IPM enforces those policies across disparate data sources, including files stored on PCs, file servers and in data repositories.

Atlas IPM can help companies reduce their document discovery and storage costs, and improve user productivity, says Deidre Paknad, president of PSS Systems, which was founded in 2001 and backed by $30 million in venture funding. It retains only a single instance of each document and disposes of unnecessary versions or records that have reached their end-of-life stage. On the legal front, the software is designed to help companies more easily find the documents they need to produce.

Companies often have retention policies, but they aren't always uniformly enforced across distributed sites. At the same time, companies store massive amounts of information that don't need to be preserved - which can complicate electronic discovery efforts, says Paknad, who founded CRM vendor CoVia Technologies in 1996 and most recently was a vice president at regulatory compliance software maker Certus.

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Start-up PSS Systems this week is expected to unveil software designed to help companies automate decisions about which documents need to be saved and which can be tossed.

The company's Atlas Information Policy Management (Atlas IPM ) suite looks to help companies create and manage policies for document retention, disposal, preservation and production. Once a company configures its policies, Atlas IPM enforces those policies across disparate data sources, including files stored on PCs, file servers and in data repositories.

Atlas IPM can help companies reduce their document discovery and storage costs, and improve user productivity, says Deidre Paknad, president of PSS Systems, which was founded in 2001 and backed by $30 million in venture funding. It retains only a single instance of each document and disposes of unnecessary versions or records that have reached their end-of-life stage. On the legal front, the software is designed to help companies more easily find the documents they need to produce.

Companies often have retention policies, but they aren't always uniformly enforced across distributed sites. At the same time, companies store massive amounts of information that don't need to be preserved - which can complicate electronic discovery efforts, says Paknad, who founded CRM vendor CoVia Technologies in 1996 and most recently was a vice president at regulatory compliance software maker Certus.

These days, information policy management software that specifies how and where to retain documents is gaining interest among companies that face compliance with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as well as an increase in litigation-related document discovery obligations. Enterprise content management vendors, such as EMC, FileNet, IBM and Open Text, offer products with version control, records management, collaboration and workflow features.

PSS Systems' software complements those companies' suites, Paknad says. "There's a whole diversity of information systems that keep certain kinds of business information, and generally those are unique to a business unit and department," she says. For example, a company might keep financial information in an SAP system and legal contracts in a separate content management system. "Atlas IPM acts as an overlay across all of the disparate systems and stores where companies keep data."

Atlas IPM consists of two main components: server-based policy management software and desktop-based enforcement agents. Policy Atlas is the suite's repository of corporate policies and schedules. Companies can oversee and authorize policies centrally, while delegating management responsibilities to staff in different locations and business units. If a legal matter requires turning over documents, companies can use Policy Atlas to handle corporate-wide notification and collection processes.

Policy Point is the enforcement component that applies policies to information repositories. Agents deployed on user desktops and file servers tag unstructured content as it's created or received. The agents can move content if necessary - if a user creates a business contract that is supposed to be stored in a particular system according to corporate retention policies, the agent will move the document to that location. Policy Point agents also can override disposal schedules if a legal matter requires certain documents be saved.