Expanding your RM capabilities with Early Case Assessment, Enhanced Legal Hold and File Plan Management

By: Raoul Miller – Enterprise Architect

TEAM has successfully deployed many WebCenter Records projects but we find that some clients or potential clients need more capabilities than the core product provides.  Recently we were working with a large international financial organization and it became clear during our scoping that Oracle’s Records Management solution would need to be integrated with other capabilities in order to meet their requirements.

WebCenter Records (WCR) is an excellent solution for managing content in-place within the WebCenter Content repository using the supported adapters but it is not designed to provide some of the additional features that might be used by in-house counsel preparing for litigation.  Additionally, although WCR has the capability to manage a very complex set of file plans and retention schedules it is not designed to manage the legal reasoning behind a given policy.

We looked at and spoke with a wide range of application vendors in the space and selected two that could both fill those gaps in the product offering and also integrate easily with the existing WebCenter and adapter footprint.  To expand WebCenter’s capabilities into the realm of litigation management, enhanced legal hold and early case assessment we chose Exterro and their Fusion suite of applications.  Integration was straightforward as Exterro had already created a proof of concept connector from their Fusion Legal Hold dashboard to a WebCenter Content (or Records) repository.  This allowed all the other aspects of their Fusion suite to interact with WCR seamlessly and offered a wide range of additional litigation management and legal hold capabilities that are outside the scope of the DoD 5015 certified WCR application.  Another set of capabilities offered by

Exterro is their early case assessment (ECA) Zeta platform which allows for analysis of content in-place before it is ingested or managed explicitly by the system (on desktops or remote file servers, for instance).  This decreases costs and complexity in the long term and gives records managers and counsel access to data when they need it.

The other substantial contribution to the solution was provided by Fontis’ Open Retention Manager (ORM).  Although WCR has very robust file plan and retention schedule capabilities, it is not designed with an interface to manage and update the legal basis for these classifications and schedules. Fontis fills that gap with legal research that proposes plans and schedules and provides all the citations for those recommendations.  ORM then manages these retention schedules on an ongoing basis and makes (and justifies) updates as required.  This is an extremely useful set of functions and particularly important for organizations in litigious environments or with complex international obligations and exposure.

Integration of these two sets of products was very straightforward – Exterro shares a similar deployment platform to WebCenter and had already developed a RESTful integration with WebCenter Content to designate repositories as non-custodial data sources.  TEAM is working actively with Exterro and Oracle Product Management to enhance and expand that integration for other clients.  For the Fontis integration, we chose a much looser coupling approach, with their ORM user interface remaining independent (for the limited set of users who required access to it) and export of file plans and retention schedules in XML. These exported file plans and retention and disposition schedules would be imported automatically to WCR using a simple translation component.  Ongoing schedule changes would be managed through workflow within WebCenter to ensure a full audit trail and chain of responsibility.

We are proud that we were able to design a complex solution to meet the broad Information Governance requirements of a large international organization by bringing together and integrating best-of-breed solutions from three different vendors.  We are committed to continuing this innovation and developing custom solutions to meet the complex demands of all our clients around the world.  If you would like to find out more or discuss your own content and information management challenges, contact us via the website, email or connect with us at Oracle Open World this week.