News

posted on 25 June 2008 10:09

Content archive supplier Mimosa has opened up its NearPoint platform to developers with a software development kit (SDK) and a Mimosa developers' network. Mimosa has also announced its support of an Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard developed by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) for the easy transfer of electronically stored information (ESI) throughout all phases of the eDiscovery process.

The free and open SDK allows customers, partners and developers to extend NearPoint’s capabilities to a broader set of content sources available for archiving such as content stored on backup tapes, and access archived content from other enterprise applications such as eDiscovery, records management, security management, traditional customer relationship management and business intelligence solutions.

The SDK contains a set of comprehensive APIs and sample applications that allow partners to utilize and/or augment the NearPoint platform in a variety of ways that drive business value for customers. It will support several workloads for third-party developers including:

• Insertion of content into the NearPoint platform and onto one of the many available storage tiers within the archive
• Seamlessly discover and view archived content leveraging the full expressiveness of the NearPoint search index
• Increase or decrease retention periods and modify metadata in-place, without re-archiving
• Perform and manage litigation holds on archived content
• Transform and export content from the NearPoint archive into partner repositories

The Mimosa Developer Network (MDN) is a program to expedite development of solutions for partner developers who want to extend their applications with archived content. Benefits include:

• No-cost license to Mimosa NearPoint software and technical documentation for developers
• Access to technical support and product teams to accelerate time to market for their solutions
• Discounts on implementation and configuration training
• Leverage Mimosa testing environment to certify integrated solutions

The SDK Turns NearPoint into an open, extensible platform for content archiving, retention management, eDiscovery and storage optimization.

XML

The EDRM XML standard – created by electronic discovery software and services providers, law firms and corporations – provides a uniform format for the exchange of content and metadata between different applications, systems, and organizations involved in the eDiscovery process.

Mimosa will support the EDRM XML within the NearPoint platform to extend archived content into downstream review and analytics applications. The company is collaborating with FTI Consulting, a global business advisory firm, to certify that archived content stored in native format can be transformed according to the XML specification and ingested into the FTI Ringtail review and analytics platform without compromising the integrity of the content, maintaining chain of custody throughout the eDiscovery process.

More than 490 customers in healthcare, government, financial services and other verticals use NearPoint for information archiving, eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, continuous data protection and disaster recovery.

According to IDC, the worldwide email archiving applications market grew 48 percent in 2007 over the last year, driven by the need for email archiving to satisfy compliance, legal discovery, and storage optimization requirements. Archiving applications are a critical foundation of the legal discovery infrastructure platform market , which IDC expects to approach more than $22 billion in 2011.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}