Financial scandals in the USA caused the enacting of new laws and regulations in several countries that force enterprises to document their business processes and decisions, to make them examinable. Since many business decisions are made nowadays by email or instant messaging, their archiving, processing and discovery is compulsory to meet the requirements. In large enterprises the amount of data and the continuing growth that must be dealt with are serious challenges for their ECM systems. To cope with these challenges highscalability plays an important role to keep the costs manageable.

The goal of the “CMaaS – Content Management as a Service” project – in the context of which the thesis was done – is to evaluate techniques to allow scale-out and dynamic provisioning for ECM systems, managing them with grid-based technologies.

In the thesis a new approach is presented that allows dynamic coordination of the data and metadata of an ECM system in a changing environment. This approach is based on overlay-techniques also used in modern Peer-to-Peer systems. An important section in this thesis is the evaluation of the measurement results of the approach that were made with a prototype for Email Archiving and Discovery. This approach seems promising for further investigation in the area of ECM systems.