To use a term from Robin Harris and Chuck Hollis, I’ve been ‘squinting’ through the EMC Source One announcement. Michael Brown’s Chalk Talk on the architecture is worth a look to see what’s new here.

It looks to me like this announcement includes lots of catch up and plenty of vision with the implied promise that SourceOne will deliver. EMC’s done some good work at integrating multiple piece parts, but this still appears to be a shove everything in a central archive approach. And as my colleagues and I have been saying on Wikibon, this won’t solve the problem of managing information risk, which is the main driver of email archiving. Let’s face it, legal is steering this bus right now, not IT and while maybe you can take a centralized approach to solve email archiving problems, files and content distributed throughout the organization present more pressing challenges.