In a corporate environment, documents are usually created or captured in a decentralized environment with no overall surveillance. Many corporations have no formal process of retaining these documents as records, which can increase storage costs. In addition, when litigation requests occur, companies can spend a huge amount of money and resources to locate records. In the case when a company is not able to locate records or to locate them on a timely manner, the company is subjected to a financial penalty or, more importantly, damage to the company's reputation. IBM Records Manager is an application and an engine that provides records management capabilities to existing business applications. It provides a single and consistent records management platform to help companies meet government and industry requirements for formal records management. This IBM Redbooks publication provides an introduction to records management and IBM Records Manager. Solution architects, designers, and implementers who plan to implement IBM Records Manager will find this book useful. It also serves as a guide for system administrators or records administrators in performing common records management administration tasks in IBM Records Manager. Lastly, the first part of this book serves as a good starting point for anyone who is interested in exploring the world of records management.

As more companies need to manage their e-mail to support regulatory compliance, litigation, and corporate policy and to improve system performance and productivity, the e-mail archiving and records management solution presented in this IBM Redbooks publication is here to rescue. In this book, we provide a general solution guide to address e-mail archiving and records management issues using the following IBM products: We describe the products’ roles in the solution and introduce the basic concepts behind e-mail archiving and e-mail records enabling. We cover features and functions of CommonStore, Records Manager, and Records Enabler, and address key areas to understand and consider when planning and designing each piece of the solution and the overall integrated solution. In addition, we discuss different system configurations, implementation paths, security, the end-to-end solution installation and configuration, and some advanced topics such as records disposition and discovery. This book is intended for IT architects and specialists who will be responsible in planning, designing, and implementing an e-mail archiving and records management solution. Please note that the additional material referenced in the text is not available from IBM.