The Electronic Communications Preservation Act, which is still at the bill stage, would place a four-year deadline on agencies to implement electronic record-keeping systems, finally forcing federal organizations to tackle shortcomings in their email strategies.
In the meantime, the feds could do worse than take a look at their state and local counterparts, which are making great strides in e-discovery and even typifying best practices.
Consider the County of Palm Beach, Fla., one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation. The Sunshine State's Sunshine Law gives citizens the legal right to request copies of all public records, so Palm Beach, like other local governments within the state, has had little choice but to grab the e-discovery bull by the horns.
We do a lot, admits Santhosh Samuel, server manager for Palm Beach Countys Information Support Services (ISS) office. Every day we archive, but we only keep 90 days of email in Outlook, he adds, explaining that email messages are stored in an electronic archive from Mimosa.
With this archive in place, the county has the flexibility to do a number of different searches and can also restore the data to different media. We can do searches and store them on PDFs, DVDs, whatever we want to do, says Samuel.