The “Distributed Custodial Archival Preservation Environments” project, DCAPE, proposes a framework to support institution-specific preservation policies and to build a distributed production preservation environment that meets the needs of archival repositories for trusted archival preservation services. The project focuses on the development of trusted digital repositories driven by institutional policies that can be highly customized. The DCAPE team is composed of technologists and archivists from state archives, university archives, and cultural institutions. Our approach is based on the emerging ISO/DIS 16363 standard on “Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories.” The services proposed follow a particular flavor of microservices and rules, based on an iRODS [1] implementation.The DCAPE framework is built on a state-of-the-art rule-based data management system. The system provides developers with the mechanism to design customized workflows as rules that will be executed by the internal rule engine. The DCAPE project hides the complexities of designing these rules and provides a user-friendly interface for users to select from the list of predefined rules to implement their policies. These policies can be applied at an institution level or at the collection level. In this paper, we will discuss the design of the framework, the preservation workflow, and the interface.