Corporate governance and legislative regulations are forcing companies to extend their IT infrastructure by Email Archive and Discovery (EAD) systems for compliance reasons. Praxis shows that every installation is di??erent from another; not only in terms of the execution infrastructure, but also in terms of e.g. document and archiving procedures that map a company’s own business rules. As a consequence, EAD systems have to be highly customizable to their intended usages.

For this purpose, we propose a service-oriented approach at various levels of detail that, on one hand, allows for describing EAD properties at the abstract (service) level and, on the other hand, supports the appropriate mapping of these services to the existing execution infrastructure. In this paper, we focus on the development and (architectural) design of an EAD system, which is well suited to fulfill these requirements. On the long run, we consider this solution as an important step on the way to an e??ective distributed and scalable approach, which, as we think, can be achieved by appropriate mechanisms of automatic workload management and dynamic provisioning of EAD services based on e.g. grid technology.