Florida Archives E-mail to Fulfill Public Records Requests

Florida's Department of Health implemented KVS Inc's Enterprise Vault e-mail archiving software to better manage the agency's growing e-mail stores and ensure compliance with Florida statutes governing citizens' access to public records.

According to the Florida Sunshine Laws, citizens have the right to request copies of all public records, including e-mails, and expect to receive them in a timely fashion. David Taylor, CIO, Department of Health, says the software automatically archives the e-mails of the department's 17,000 Microsoft Exchange users statewide, and has already significantly reduced the time his team spends fulfilling public records requests.

"We were recently presented with a request that required retrieving 7,700 relevant e-mails," said Taylor. "Using Enterprise Vault's search and retrieval capabilities, we spent only five hours searching for and restoring the e-mails and burning them onto CDs, a process that would have taken over 1,000 man-hours to complete under our old method of restoring from volumes of back-up tapes."

The department is now in the process of implementing Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator, a tool that saves the time, money and resources required to sift through thousands of e-mails and attachments in response to a lawsuit or subpoena. All internal/external e-mail is archived so designated users (attorney, paralegal) can quickly target specific information and instantly search and review content.