Patent ID: 7493350

Claim:
A method of controlling data, comprising the steps of: defining one or more data management rules associated with a data retention policy for one or more data objects, each of the one or more data management rules specifying an application system associated with the one or more data objects, parameters identifying the one or more data objects and a software module performing archival management of the one or more data objects, the one or more data management rules defined by a criteria, which is passed as other parameters and comprises processing limitations, the processing limitations configured to include a retention period or a storage size, the parameters defining an instance of a parameter type, which specifies a data management rule name associated with the one or more data management rules, an entity name, and an attribute name; executing the software module, which is configured to perform the archival management and move the one or more data objects to another storage system when an event occurs during at least one of a time triggered event or a completion of a computer job, the event identifying at least one of the one or more data management rules to control the archival management based on the parameters and the specified application system for performing archival management operations on the one or more data objects identified by the one or more data management rules; and defining one or more data management rule types associated with the data retention policy, the one or more data management rules each define an instance of the data management rule types, wherein the one or more data rule types specify a named type of rule that describes a data retention policy for an entity type, and the one or more data rule types have the following attributes controlling the archival management: i) an application ID, ii) an application system ID, iii) a corporation ID, iv) a managed entity name, v) controlling entity name, vi) a role CD, vii) controlling date column ID, and viii) a data retention policy ID.