It is important to understand that Enterprise Vault Compliance Accelerator and Discovery Accelerator were created for different purposes.

Discovery Accelerator is an electronic discovery and review system that integrates with Enterprise Vault services and archives. Discovery Accelerator lets authorized users search for, retrieve and preserve, analyze, review, mark, and export or produce emails, documents, and other electronic items for lead counsel examination or court-ready production - rapidly and in a cost-effective manner.

Using attorneys and external counsel to review large numbers of items is costly. With Discovery Accelerator, you can create a hierarchy of reviewers for a discovery action or case, with different levels of reviewers able to assign certain review marks. In this way, paralegal staff and non-legal staff can perform an initial review of search and collection results and leave only the privileged, relevant, or questionable items for counsel. Optionally, you can then produce the relevant items with an appropriate "Bates" number or else simply export them from Discovery Accelerator in various native formats and load file formats.

Compliance Accelerator enables companies to implement an ongoing electronic message monitoring policy, in order to meet requirements set by the company or by an industry regulatory body, such as SEC. As a company would set up monitoring for departments, work in Compliance Accelerator is set up in terms of departments and monitored employees within the departments. Compliance Accelerator deals exclusively with email, instant messages and faxes; you cannot search for or view documents held in file system archives.

Compliance Accelerator samples messages as they are archived and adds the messages automatically to the review set for the department. Although reviewers have a similar role to Discovery Accelerator reviewers, the marking scheme in Compliance Accelerator is simpler.

Both Accelerator products have an automatic search facility. In Compliance, this can be used for ongoing monitoring of company mail for particular behavior, such as unacceptable language or sending confidential information outside the company.