CM braces for Sarbanes-Oxley

Content-management vendors are rolling out tools that help enterprises comply with new and forthcoming regulations governing storage and retention of specific records.

One piece of legislation with a looming fall deadline, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, requires organizations to attest to internal controls and how financial management is governed and reported.

To that end, IBM is preparing a compliance toolset that ties together its Lotus Notes messaging and Tivoli storage technologies with records and content-management systems. Documentum this week plans to roll out a combination of products and services aimed at helping companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. And last month FileNet partnered with Steelpoint Technologies to offer a regulatory compliance and risk-management solution.

Big Blue is aggressively developing a compliance offering designed to help companies deal with Sarbanes Oxley and other SEC regulations, according to Bruce Miller, e-records strategy and business development executive at Somers, N.Y.-based IBM.

"We are building e-records capabilities directly into the core content management and Lotus product lines. [E-records] is just the underpinning. We recognize the records capability as only a part of compliance solution," Miller said.

The currently unnamed system will combine existing products and new technologies, he said, and will meet the core requirements for compliance, which include the ability to capture and store e-mail, instant messaging, and other correspondence. In addition, IBM is currently developing supervision technologies for monitoring, reviewing, and producing an audit trail for correspondence. No release date has been set, but IBM is seeing "intense interest" from customers right now, Miller said.

The Corporate Governance and Compliance Solution that Pleasanton, Calif-based Documentum will release on Monday uses existing records management, CM, collaboration technologies, preconfigured templates, process controls, and services provided through a partnership with BearingPoint. The product set includes eRoom templates designed to facilitate collaboration-related compliance activities while maintaining related documents in a secure repository, according to Documentum officials in Pleasanton, Calif. The offering also adds automated workflows and lifecycle management for collecting and managing financial information.

"By instituting a strong records management [system], including e-mail and IM, and by putting compliance guidelines around that, you can be proactive in managing your risks instead of reacting," said Charles Brett, senior program director at Meta Group in Reston, Va.

Compliance with bills such as Sarbanes-Oxley "is more than just managing corporate content. Under the requirements you have to declare certain data and content as records. Then you have different rules and policies [governing] the lifecycle, retention, access, and distribution of that data," Brett said.