The invention provides instructions to a retention-base archiving application or other enterprise content management application (such as EMC Documentum) for identifying which data objects should share the same retention policy based upon content and context, even if the retention policies for each data object was originally selected by different archiving applications. By matching together data objects with the same retention interval, and/or matching together data objects with the same policy name (i.e., policy ID), a single retention policy can be assigned to related data objects, no matter the source of each related data object or which application selected the particular retention policy for each data object.