Symantec announced on Monday it acquired LiveOffice for $115 million, a transaction that was completed on Jan. 13 and now gives Symantec an in-house, cloud-based archiving tool for legal documents, e-mail, file-sharing services and communications on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Symantec and LiveOffice have had an OEM relationship since 2010 and the archiving service was rebranded as EnterpriseVault.cloud in April 2011.

LiveOffice already has some level of integration with Symantec’s Enterprise Vault and Clearwell eDiscovery platform to provide email storage management, legal discovery and regulatory compliance. Now Symantec can more tightly integrate LiveOffice with Clearwell so end users can perform more detailed data analysis and generate narrower results when searching for legal documents. The archiving tool serves as the knowledge repository while the eDiscovery platform provides the analysis capability.

“When you are looking for these legal documents, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” said Brian Dye, vice president for Symantec’s Information Intelligence Group. “Many times in these cases what you are looking for boils down to four or five documents. If you can get tighter and tighter results, you are transferring less data.”

Symantec also plans to build a common user interface and account provisioning tool for LiveOffice and its anti-spam Symantec MessageLabs Email Security.cloud

“We don’t have a time frame [for delivering the enhancements] right now,” Dye said. “We will have one quickly.”

LiveOffice has nearly 20,000 customers, Forrester analyst Brian Hill wrote in a blog about the deal. The company “historically marketed to small- and mid-sized financial services firms. Over the past couple of years, however, the vendor has steadily bolstered its archiving and broader information governance functionality, lined up productive partnerships with major technology vendors, and met with success in selling to larger organizations across a wider set of vertical markets,” Hill wrote.

The vendor set out to improve its information management capabilities in the new version by redesigning its Web interface for search (using Microsoft’s FAST) and overhauling its data mining, classification, records management, work flow management, role-level access and legal hold features.

CommVault calls the process Retention Lifecycle Management (RLM), which CommVault’s information access management director Simon Taylor compared to ILM for compliance.

When asked if Simpana was crossing into content management, Taylor said: “We are going in that direction. We are able to retain objects, and classify and virtualize them over time. We also move data across tiers to the cloud. It’s about better retention and access to information.”

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau CommVault said has made it easier to search and classification information with Simpana 9 by adding search within search and automatically tagging data based on pre-defined criteria.

“CommVault has always been strong on the capture side,” he said. “[Simpana] could manage the data in a backup or archive workflow. Now, it’s made it much easier from the GUI to the actual information classification so you can navigate it. So now users can actually find data and take more action with it.”

He said the addition of templates that let users customize workflows also simplifies records management, but a key area to watch will be Simpana’s search performance.

“If you have existing rules in a content management and want to add email, you don’t have to connect email to your content management system, you can create a template in Simpana,” he said. “Of course, I think they will still be questioned on their search response times.”

The new offering is based on the company’s acquisition of data classification company Avalere in 2007, and Iron Mountain first released it to customers at the end of 2009. Iron Mountain plans to integrate Connected Classify & Collect with Iron Mountain’s other cloud data storage services, LiveVault and Virtual File Store (VFS), although the vendor has given no timeframe for that yet.

Data collection on corporate PCs is one of the thorniest areas in e-discovery, according to analysts. Iron Mountain claims pre-classifying data will lead to more comprehensive e-discovery searches. “We’ve come to realize that Connected can be more accurate than file shares or impounding employee laptops,” Iron Mountain Digital director of product management David Asher told SearchDataBackup last year. “By the time laptops are impounded, an employee may have had days to delete data.”

Hill predicts an increase in litigation and regulation due to the economic crisis because “To promote confidence and greater macroeconomic stability, we expect governing agencies to institute new regulations, and we anticipate litigation following job losses, broken contracts, and other economic hardships.”

Meanwhile, one year after the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure created a mandate for companies to systematically preserve electronic information, users were telling SearchStorage.com that before they could evaluate specific products or services for archiving and litigation review of data, organizational structures within their company had to realign to create new data management policies.

Another year has passed and Hill’s report states “Effective alignment between the information management phase and other steps outlined in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) remains out of reach for most enterprises.”

The good news is that companies will at least make steps toward that vision in 2009, Hill told Storage Soup. “There’s broad recognition that it needs to happen,” he said. “We’re starting to see new liaison roles being created, designated intersection points of IT with legal.” However, the two remain sharply different disciplines, with a historically separate reporting structure and few other common objectives. “The reality is it’s a long way out before [a major shift] happens.”

In the meantime, Hill said Forrester advises clients to focus on two of the steps in the EDRM: information preservation and review. Administrators should strive to apply policies to as broad a range of content as possible rather than focusing on particular content types–organizing data according to potential legal relevance rather than application means users may start out with less information to wade through during a litigation request, as well as cutting down on capacity growth also threatening to bust storage budgets this year.

The second phase of EDRM Hill advised users to focus on for the time being is the review phase. “This is where the most spending is,” Hill said, recommending that particularly cash-strapped organizations look to the clouds for their content repositories. “Hosted review platforms can make some difference–something internal can require a lot of capital.”