Filenet Corporation recently announced the release of a new email archiving product called Filenet Email Manager. This is an extension to Filenet P8 Enterprise Content Management Suite that provides a full spectrum enterprise content management capability. Filenet's Email Manager handles the usual archiving tasks of capturing organising, monitoring, retrieving and searching email.

Filenet emphasises the twin benefits of email compliance and improved access to corporate knowledge. In fact, Filenet says that theirs is the first solution that makes email an active element in business processes. Filenet applies business rules to manage the lifecycle of email according to its content and importance.

As more and more enterprise content management vendors roll out email archiving solutions, it is likely that we will see the dissolution of the partnerships between pure play email archiving vendors and enterprise content management vendors. But this relationship was always going to be a temporary fling. There wasn't much chance that the enterprise content management vendors would leave such a juicy morsel as mandatory email archiving on the table.

It is surprising that this "bubble" of a market opportunity arose in the first place. One would think that enterprise content management vendors would have caught onto the importance of email and instant messaging much sooner. The problem is the usual one, of defining the problem they are solving too narrowly. Enterprise content management is not about managing documents and digital media; it's about controlling and managing all of the organization's information assets and information communications. Dynamic information such as email, instant messages, voice mail and web transactions are as important as static web pages and documents. The value of dynamic information is often higher because it is "information in action" – one of the definitions of knowledge.

Organisations that have implemented point solutions for e-mail archiving may feel that they have solved their problems but they can't be sure that new requirements won't arise that require another point solution and produce an increasingly fragmented information architecture. If companies are to realise the benefits of implementing enterprise content management they need to start with the development of an Information Architecture to identify all the information assets, the processes that generate and use them and the opportunities internally and externally of exploiting these assets.

Only then will organizations gain the long term benefits of a holistic information strategy rather than bouncing from one point solution to another, allowing pure-play e-mail archive vendors to make a killing as they have last year.