Purging Content.

While designing a content management system there are three parameters that one should take care of.

1. Input: What goes into the CM system.
2. Manage: How to store and manage things inside the system
3. Output: What should leave the system or what should be retained in the system.

Input to the system is controlled by creating filters and restricting access to users on what can be added to the system.
We leverage taxonomy, content types, folders rules, events and other capabilities of the CM system to manage content that is inside the system.
Now what stays in the system and what leaves is a tricky questions. In the first place you invested on a CM to manage all your content, then why should some thing leave? Having a clear stratergy as to what stays in the system keeps the CM system lean and fit. It also saves you infrastructure and memory costs. You may argue that memory is getting cheaper day by day why care about it. The truth is recovery costs per GB is more than the actual GB cost.
When I started research as to how purge content in UCM environament I came across Jasons blog where is explains how to purge content using archiver with minimal customisation.