U.S. State and Local Governments Customers of Mimosa

Mimosa Systems announced that federal, state and local governments across the U.S. are using Mimosa NearPoint to comply with the principles outlined in President Barack Obama’s Whitehouse Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Mimosa NearPoint’s comprehensive email retention management, eDiscovery, end-user search, and mailbox management delivers the information public sector organizations require to perform unstructured information management for email, files, SharePoint and instant messages, so that they may easily adhere to FOIA mandates.

“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,” said President Obama in the Whitehouse memorandum. “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. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.”

State and local governments across the country – including The State of Delaware, Palm Beach County, Madera County, Chester County, City of Lenexa, and City of Safety Harbor – have turned to the Mimosa NearPoint next-generation content archiving solution to address long-term data retention needs to support FOIA, and discovery requests.

The State of Delaware
To serve its growing population, the State of Delaware offers numerous state agencies, from its legislative and judicial branches to its Department of Health and Social Services, all 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,” said 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 FOIA disclosure and eDiscovery 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 because it was the only unified solution for eDiscovery, storage optimization and disaster recovery.”

Palm Beach County
Palm Beach County has a population of more than 1.25 million residents with growth expected in the double-digits over the next decade. With such growth comes greater demand on governmental resources and Palm Beach County is modernizing its infrastructure to meet increasing growth. Because Florida ‘s Sunshine Law gives citizens the legal right to request copies of all public records, including email, the County must retain all documents according to a strict retention policy. The Mimosa NearPoint solution was selected over leading competitors as it was the only offering that satisfied business requirements, including complete capture of all Exchange 2007 data, eDiscovery workflow, simple installation, and administration.

“Florida’s Sunshine Law requires unlimited data retention, challenging us to implement an email system capable of producing the public records required by our State and Federal regulations,” said Santhosh Samuel, Server Manager for Palm Beach County’s Information Support Services (ISS) office. “Mimosa Systems not only retains all Exchange 2007 data in the archive indefinitely, but provides immediate access to information when called for–whether it is an email, or any other user-produced content associated with Exchange 2007. Mimosa was a clear choice and exceeded our expectations with advanced capabilities, fast deployment, and ease-of-use that impressed our entire information support team.”
 
City of Lenexa
The City of Lenexa is located in the central part of Johnson County, in northeast Kansas. The city’s population, standing at almost 46,000 in 2007, increased by nearly 15 percent since 2000 according to the U.S. Census Bureau and Lenexa Planning and Development Department. The fourth most populous city in Johnson County, Lenexa is a satellite city of Kansas City, Mo. As in most growing cities today, the majority of the city’s business applications require email and as such Microsoft Exchange has become a vital part of Lenexa’s communications infrastructure.

“Mimosa NearPoint delivers advanced information archiving for retention, electronic discovery, auditing and access, further aligning our IT systems with core operational and compliance requirements,” said Michael Lawrence, Senior Network Administrator, City of Lenexa. “With the NearPoint archiving solution in place, we are able to satisfy legal and operational demands for a more compliant and efficient organization.”

“State and local governments are under intense pressure and scrutiny in the face of stringent disclosure requirements in order to comply with a FOIA request,” said T.M. Ravi, CEO, Mimosa Systems. “We continue to see strong demand for our next-generation archiving solution at the federal, state and local levels. Mimosa NearPoint provides the comprehensive retention policies and discovery workflow these organizations need to address their disclosure and FOIA requirements.”