Enhanced Retention Management (ERM)

The Content Manager OnDemand Enhanced Retention Management feature enables you to manage and enforce retention of documents.

In a Content Manager OnDemand system, you retain documents for a specific amount of time. This practice is commonly referred to as retention management. Records management describes the process of retaining and deleting documents under a set of circumstances that are not necessarily bounded by time, for example, until the end of litigation.

Without the Enhanced Retention Management feature, Content Manager OnDemand cannot implement records management due to the following limitations:
  • Records management requires that you have control over individual documents. Content Manager OnDemand manages application groups instead of individual documents and works with a storage manager to delete (expire) documents.
  • Records management requires flexibility in defining the time when documents are deleted. However, Content Manager OnDemand defines only the time when application groups with fixed time ranges are deleted, for example, five years after Content Manager OnDemand loads documents.
To overcome these limitations, you can purchase and install the Enhanced Retention Management feature. With the Enhanced Retention Management feature, you can control individual documents by introducing holds, a mechanism that identifies the documents that you want to keep for some time. To expire a document with a hold, you need to remove the hold. Holds give you flexibility to choose when to delete documents because you control when to remove a hold. By using holds, you control when to delete a document. You can manage holds through any of the following interfaces:
  • Content Manager OnDemand client or administrative client
  • IBM® Content Navigator
  • ARSDOC command
  • ODWEK Java APIs
  • FileNet P8 when you integrate it with Content Federation Services for Content Manager OnDemand by enabling the Content Federation Services for Content Manager OnDemand. The Content Federation Services for Content Manager OnDemand also enables you to federate Content Manager OnDemand repositories. This feature connects your Content Manager OnDemand content to business process management (IBM BPM) and records management features of FileNet P8.