Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches Featuring Mimosa Systems and the State of Delaware

By Messaging News staff
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To serve its growing population, the State of Delaware has numerous state agencies, from its legislative and judicial branches to its Department of Health and Social Services, all of which rely heavily upon email to conduct daily business. Currently the Department of Technology and Information for the State of Delaware is managing 18,500 mailboxes in support of all offices and government agencies for the state. However, its IT organization was burdened with an increasing number of discovery requests that continued to consume time and resources which were already stretched thin from typical end-user support requests.

“As part of our mandated state litigation retention policy, we are currently saving all emails for a one-year period,” says Douglas Lilly, lead telecom technologist, Department of Technology and Information for the State of Delaware. “While we had a backup solution already, it wasn’t robust enough for our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure and e-Discovery search. We needed a more proactive approach that could capture everything including calendar items, messages, tasks and item histories. After looking at all the large players, we selected Mimosa Systems because it was the only unified solution for e-Discovery, storage optimization and disaster recovery.”

Mimosa Systems, a provider of next-generation email, file and SharePoint archiving solutions, recently announced that the State of Delaware along with other state and local governments across the country including: Palm Beach County, Madera County, Chester County, City of Lenexa, and City of Safety Harbor—are using Mimosa NearPoint to comply with the principles outlined in President Barack Obama’s Whitehouse Memorandum1 on the FOIA.

“All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government,” notes President Obama in the Whitehouse memorandum1. “The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA. The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public.”

Published July 13, 2009