The software helps Oceanside's IT department fulfill public records requests in minutes instead of days, which translates into significant cost savings, particularly as the city copes with increased requests that come during an election season. "We have significantly reduced our search and retrieval time of e-mail requests," says Oceanside CIO, Michael Lee Sherwood. "We recoup the money we spent to purchase and maintain the system if we use it for just a few requests a year. Since we process roughly 30 requests a year, and more in an election year, the [return on investment] is tremendous."
Election season keeps the city's IT department especially busy. "We see a significant increase in the number of public records requests in the days leading up to and following Election Day from citizens and the media," he said. "Before implementing VERITAS Enterprise Vault software to automatically archive all e-mails that pass through our Microsoft Exchange environment, the process of locating and recovering e-mails was extremely time consuming and expensive. The law requires that e-mails must be available to the public, and we want to maintain one-hundred percent compliance with that mandate and provide excellent service to our citizens."
Sherwood says that before installing the records management software, the city spent an inordinate amount of time, especially during election years, meeting requests. The city's e-mail retention policy was to simply copy e-mails and attachments onto back-up tapes, so a single public records request meant IT staffers had to retrieve boxes of tapes from an off-site location and spend days searching each tape for relevant files.
"Meeting a request that involved only a few e-mails could take anywhere from eight to 20 hours, so looking for month's worth of data could take weeks and often our records were not 100 percent complete," says Sherwood. "Because every employee managed his or her own e-mail account, messages and attachments that should have been saved were sometimes accidentally deleted."
