With a population of more than 1.25 million residents, Palm Beach County expects growth in the double digits over the next decade. To meet the anticipated demand on governmental resources, county officials have embarked on various projects to modernize its infrastructure.

One such project involves migrating e-mail programs in government offices to Microsoft Exchange 2007. E-mail archiving goes hand-in-hand with the migration, based on requirements to provide long-term retention of information.

In Florida, citizens have the legal right to request copies of all public records, including e-mail, so government entities must retain all documents indefinitely.

“Florida’s Sunshine Law requires unlimited data retention, challenging us to implement an e-mail system capable of producing the public records required by these legal regulations,” said Santhosh Samuel, Server Manager for Palm Beach County’s Information Support Services (ISS) office.

To meet demands for long-term retention of e-mail information, county officials selected NearPoint software, developed by Mimosa Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.). The software complements the Microsoft Exchange Server, providing a streamlined solution to unify e-mail archiving, recovery and storage management.

The County selected NearPoint following a pilot deployment that involved competition among Mimosa Systems and three other vendors.

Mimosa NearPoint capabilities that drove selection by Palm Beach County included:

* Continuous capture and archiving of all Exchange 2007 data, metadata and context, including all e-mail, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes and tasks.

* The ability to non-disruptively scale with information-technology architecture.

* Ease of use that reduces Help Desk inquiries.

* Simple installation for a seamless transition that meets archiving requirements.

Besides e-mail archiving, NearPoint provides legal-search workflow, immediate mailbox and message recovery, disaster recovery, and self-service search and access, all in one solution.

“This is a strategic win for Mimosa Systems and Microsoft as Palm Beach County will be looked upon as an innovator to be mirrored by regional governments across the state to solve their data retention and protection challenges,” said T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa Systems. “At both the technical and management level, Microsoft reaffirmed support for Mimosa Systems’ archiving solution, designing an architecture that took home the gold.”