County IT staff outline plan for multifactor logins, Laserfiche retention and website redesign

Okanogan County information-technology staff reported progress on multifactor authentication options, email-retention policy work and a county website redesign during the commission meeting.

The county’s IT lead said staff are evaluating Microsoft Authenticator and other token-based systems and noted users can add multiple accounts to the app so it can be used for county logins. He said Microsoft Authenticator “is not a link…that shares no information in my emails,” and that staff will continue to help users adopt Teams, OneDrive and document-collaboration tools.

IT staff highlighted email-retention as a user-level responsibility and said the county has 1) cloud backups and 2) the Laserfiche document-management system available to manage retention schedules. The IT lead described Laserfiche’s retention module as able to mark items for destruction on a future date and to create an audit log of deletions; he said the county bought single-user Laserfiche licenses and is evaluating whether to renew the retention module or pay later to re‑add it.

IT staff also said they have met with CivicPlus and picked a website template; CivicPlus will begin migrating content into the new design and will provide guidelines to departments about what content to keep, remove or migrate.

Commissioners asked about using authenticators on personal phones, whether the authenticator exposes email contents, and the training and costs associated with Laserfiche retention. IT staff said authenticators simply generate rotating numeric codes and do not share email content; they offered to arrange Laserfiche trainings and to provide departments with retention-index screenshots if an archive-to‑hardware strategy is requested.

The discussion ended with IT offering follow-up training and a request that departments cooperate on retention indexing so records destruction can be logged consistently.