Lighthouse Unveils Open-Source Message Archiving Software

Lighthouse Global Technologies, Stamford, CT, has brought out an open source electronic message archiving program to aid in regulatory compliance and legal discovery.

The new E-Trail Digital Archive software captures e-mail, instant messages, faxes and other unstructured data using one of three methods: real-time capture, batch capture or backfilling from archive media in any format. In all cases the product uses single instance storage on the message as well as each attachment.

Messages are retrieved through a web interface that allows users to select communications based on any combination of sender(s), receiver(s), date/time windows, department codes, and keyword/phrases/regular expressions. Moreover, the queries can be fine-tuned to include case sensitivity/insensitivity, external/internal/all communication filters, and Boolean operations on the sender/receiver fields, according to Lighthouse. Queries can also be scheduled to launch automatically.

The software includes an audit-ready role and/or user-based authentication subsystem, a query management system, and a reporting mechanism.

While Lighthouse claims that E-Trail Digital Archive can scale to any size organization; it was designed with small- and medium-sized businesses in mind. Enterprise license costs start at $10,000.

"There is no excuse for any organization to ignore its Sarbanes-Oxley obligations with respect to information archiving and retrieval," said Arthur Riel, CTO of Lighthouse Global. "The regulators and judges have zero tolerance concerning a lack of document production in either regulatory investigations or civil litigation. A quick survey of current news articles will find the landscape littered with the stories of companies who ignored this operating facet of their firms."