Three new product releases aimed at the electronic discovery market close out the last week of summer.The waning days of summer are usually a slow time for the technology industry. Big announcements were rolled out at the spring tradeshows, or are being plotted for post-Labor Day releases. Employees are on vacation. The industry recharges.

But apparently not in the e-discovery market. Clearwell Systems, Kazeon, and StoredIQ took advantage of the lull to make some noise about product advances.

Clearwell makes software to help legal teams analyze reams of electronic information (e-mail, files, and so on) gathered as part of a discovery effort. The company announced version 4.0 of its E-Discovery Platform.

New to version 4.0 are enhanced search capabilities to better identify relevant information, including preview searches. A preview search lets users try a variety of search terms to see which produces the best results and identify which keywords should be used in an official search.

It also offers search filters to help eliminate irrelevant results. For instance, if a legal review team wants documents that contain "falsification" and "earnings," they can enter wild cards such as fals* and ear*. The search will return unrelated results, such as "false teeth" and "earrings." Users can eliminate those types of results from future searches.

Also, emerging requirements from federal courts are compelling litigants to demonstrate how search results are obtained, to ensure that search efforts are vigorous and comprehensive. Enhancements to the E-Discovery Platform let users create reports that show all the search criteria used, and how search queries were refined during discovery.

These week also saw announcements from Kazeon and StoredIQ, both of which offer products for early-stage e-discovery efforts. They differ from Clearwell in that Clearwell analyzes a corpus of information that already has been collected from across the enterprise. Kazeon and StoredIQ make the tools that search across multiple repositories to find and collect information to be passed on to review tools such as Clearwell.

Kazeon announced version 3.1 of the Information Server IS1200-ECS. This software crawls enterprise repositories to index content, allowing IT and legal teams to more easily search for relevant files and documents at the outset of a discovery effort.

New to 3.1 is the ability to crawl desktops and laptops without the use of an agent. Enterprises can use the agentless technology to crawl and index employee machines on demand -- say in response to a litigation event -- or at regular intervals as part of an overall information management strategy.

In addition, the new version lets administrators place legal holds on files and documents where they reside. A legal hold suspends deletion so that potentially relevant information can't be destroyed. By enabling in-place legal holds, administrators can preserve information without having to move it to a separate storage repository.

StoredIQ also launched a new product this week. Version 4.6 of its eDiscovery Appliance improves its integration with third-party repositories. It can identify and classify unstructured data and move them into EMC's Documentum, a leading records management platform, as records. It can also place legal holds on those records. It also now supports Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint 2007, and can manage mail and files in those repositories.