In the wake of several financial scandals, enterprises today are facing the challenges to document their business processes and decisions in order to be compliant with regulations of new local and international laws. Emails, as an important part of business data, their archiving and discovery become compulsory. However, the ever growing data volume requires large companies to reform their conventional Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems with a more effective and cost efficient way.

The thesis is done in the context of the project ā€¯CMaaS - Content Management as a Serviceā€¯, which aims to evaluate possible techniques for ECM systems allowing scale-out, self management, and dynamic provision based on grid technologies.

The outcome of the thesis is a new approach for coordination of full-text indexes in a dynamic, distributed ECM environment. A global and consistent view of indexes is achieved by using relational database and cluster file system. In addition, index partitioning and merging are applied to improve indexing and search performance. The prototype for Email Archiving and Discovery (EAD) System of the project is used for implementation and evaluation of this approach.