"As a result of the corporate accounting scandals of the last few years, new laws and the increased enforcement of old laws now require enterprises to re-evaluate their recordsmanagement policies," stated Maurene Caplan Grey, Research Director, Gartner. "The growth in the volume of electronic, written communications, specifically instant messaging, forces enterprises to find a new approach to meeting active archiving requirements. Working to reduce the risk of regulatory noncompliance and extending access to the information contained in these communications is a critical element for corporations today."

Archive Server simplifies the ability for compliance operations to manage and record context, communications and system information from MindAlign for integration with existing management processes. Additionally, Archive Server provides organizations with the ability to integrate valuable data into other enterprise systems such as centralized knowledge management and supply chain and demand chain applications by aggregating, formatting and delivering end user message activity, including all forms of group chat and private chat, along with channel permissions and other contextual data.

Recognizing the increasing importance of ensuring industry compliance and managing corporate knowledge, MindAlign Archive Server is designed using a pluggable architecture where preconfigured Archive Integration Modules can be deployed or custom Integration Modules can be developed. Archive Integration Modules deliver the MindAlign message traffic to one or more external systems in real-time augmenting the existing persistent group capabilities of central to MindAlign's architecture.

Current Archive Integration Modules include:

• Compliance Integration Modules
  The Compliance Archive Integration Module is designed to integrate the MindAlign message traffic with third-party compliance applications and processes. Compliance Integration Modules provide integration to leading compliance management applications and to WORM (Write Once, Read Many) archives. Additional compliance archive integrations can be developed using the Archive Server API.
  
• Knowledge Management Integration Modules
  The ability to capture and harness the value of tacit knowledge has been a continuous struggle of Knowledge Management (KM) vendors. Email and IM contain valuable knowledge and information but provide no structure or means for harnessing this value. With the persistent topic and group-based capabilities of MindAlign the knowledge
  exchanged can be utilized through MindAlign's BackChat capability, or extended into KM applications or other proprietary systems.
  
• Supply Chain & Demand Chain Integration Modules
  A key component of effectively managing customer service, new sales opportunities and on-going account management is historical knowledge. While sales force automation and customer service and support solutions record key customer information, they cannot account for the tacit discussions that lead to a decision, or other historical information created in the course of business. When an employee leaves an organization, the customer and the organization suffer from the contextual relevance lost. By leveraging MindAlign Archive Server integrations with Supply Chain and Demand Chain applications, organizations are able to link contextual discussions of an account and operations specific to key accounts to the primary account management or service and support applications.

"Archive Server is the perfect extension to MindAlign, and enables the business community to continue deriving ultimate value from the use of MindAlign while also enabling the IT community to take control of their data. We have learned from our customers that there are several different interpretations of the SEC and NASD rulings, and therefore different archiving needs," stated
Robert Serr, chief technology officer for Parlano. "To address these requirements, we have built an extremely powerful and flexible system for arching in multiple formats, whether it be well-know proxies and archives, custom data repositories, or value-added KM systems."