As we continue to find out, there are many ways to skin the compliance cat, especially when it comes to archiving. And every once in a while simple ideas crop up that are relatively inexpensive to deploy and can really help the compliance cause.

Here's an example: We've all heard that archiving is less than half the battle in proving compliance with several key regulations. Once the data is archived, you have to be able to quickly search and discover the files critical to any ongoing litigation or compliance audit.

So why not use a system to automatically tag the files before they are stored? Seems logical, but such a system would have to based on preset policies for classifying files before they enter the archive. And with something as unstructured and diverse as E-mail, that in itself can be a pretty tall order.

Yes, some vendors offer something like this as part of their overall archiving systems, but what if you already have an archiving system?

Well, Orchestria has a piece of technology that often gets overlooked among its other compliance, threat and policy management, and behavior monitoring systems. The company's Smart Tagging technology can automatically apply rich metadata to the millions of messages that hit a corporate e-mail system every day, before those messages reach the archive. And it can be set up to look for special content such as discussions of financial records, intellectual property, employment solicitations, and personal communications. And then set retention periods based on the tagged categories to help manage storage costs.It seems simple, and it is. But perhaps the best thing is that it's not bundled up as part of some overall archiving "solution." In fact Orchestria just unveiled a deal with Symantec Corp. to offer its Smart Tagging technology to customers of Symantec's Enterprise Vault e-mail and content archiving software.

Symantec has also partnered with Kazeon, MessageGate and Recommind as part of its Intelligent Archiving Partner program. The program is designed to allow automated classification of content to provide intelligent storage, and discovery.

I think deals like this are an important trend in this young but rapidly evolving compliance software market. The ability to add capabilities without reinventing something as fundamental as archiving and storage management, will help reduce long term compliance costs. Let's see more ideas like this.