No surprise! In recent years, there has an explosive growth in the creation and collection of documents and other rich content by both applications and individuals. Large corporations have massive amounts of content (hundreds and sometimes thousands of terabytes each day, as per Fortune 100) which are often scattered across different jurisdictions. In addition to the significant volumes of content, there are practically thousands of different types of information within the enterprise – print streams, images, ERP/CRM reports, Office documents, databases, e-mail, Website content, instant messages and rich media such as audio and video files.

Each content type has different formats – each with its own unique requirements. A few years back, an IDC survey found that, on average, there are 24 repositories in a company. Large companies possess on average more than 42 repositories including multiple content management systems. Added to that, content without simple access is useless. Business users are demanding simple and rapid access to information in all corporate repositories – regardless of source, format, platform or storage media. Thanks to popular search engines, users expect this search to be done securely from a simple Web interface or within a line of business (LOB) application.

However, companies simply cannot migrate everything into one single repository for simple and obvious reasons:

• Expensive and risky migration
• One size does not fit all
• Political reasons
• Features functions
• Performance, scalability, reliability (i.e. can a Fortune 50 bank run everyone off only one ECM system)

RSD GLASS^® client is a proven and tested solution allowing companies to “federate” content (i.e. keep it in one place) and manage the policies and lifecycle actions from a single location. This allows companies to mitigate risks across the enterprise by enforcing information retention with centralized policies and access compliance reports and logs from a unique interface. This deployment encourages “best of breed” approach by leveraging existing technology investments and maintaining content processing. Applications continue feeding information to repositories while leveraging information governance policies defined in RSD GLASS. RSD GLASS^® Governance Manager provides a dashboard to manage the content across the various repositories while RSD GLASS^® client delivers governed content to authorized users in a transparent way – regardless where the information physically resides. It is the component of RSD GLASS that enables a single query to go across all the sources with automatic consolidation and categorization of results. RSD GLASS has the search features users are accustomed to including phrase, wildcard and proximity queries. The search is executed from the out of the box graphical user interface and/or from a line of business application.

• Reduces overall costs by eliminating redundant and uncoordinated RM activities
• Offers a centralized policy engine that is repository agnostic
• Helps executives during mergers and acquisitions
• Authorized users have secure high speed access to governed content
• Facilitates global compliance by ensuring information is handled correctly in each jurisdiction
• Leverages and more effectively manages  existing ECM and RM systems in place in your company