Council approves email-archiving service to improve public-records retrieval
Loading...
Summary
The council approved an annual subscription to an email-archiving product after staff said the city's current tools return incomplete results for public-records searches; staff said the service will index historical email and help respond to records requests.
The Medical Lake City Council unanimously approved a subscription to a third-party email-archiving service to improve public-records retrieval after staff reported problems getting complete search results from current tools.
Staff said the city has received 81 public-records requests this year and that existing, generic archiving options tied to Office 365 were "inadequate for accomplishing what we need," creating potential liability for incomplete responses. The proposed product, quoted at approximately $1,200 per year for the citys deployment level, will synchronize with the citys existing email and archive historical messages so staff can retrieve records going back several years.
"We have found that the software that Executech utilizes, which is very generic... is inadequate for accomplishing what we need to," staff told council. Staff described the chosen vendor as meeting the city's requirements without adopting more expensive systems that offer additional features the city would not use. Legal counsel and city staff reviewed contract terms and noted an auto-renewal clause; staff said they would cancel within the vendor's 30-day window if the product did not meet expectations.
Council action: motion and unanimous approval to execute a service agreement for the email-archiving product. Council asked staff to budget the ongoing cost in future years and to monitor renewal terms.
