A local investment firm stood accused of stealing more than $1 million from the coffers of Pennsylvania’s Venango County, and frantic local information technology officials could not provide prosecutors with a crucial e-mail message as part of an evidence discovery request. Although the elusive electronic exchange did not damage the case and the firm was found guilty, the incident led to substantial e-mail management changes.

Technology officials at all levels of government dread coming up short in an electronic discovery process or regulatory audit. The prospect of losing e-mail messages from angry citizens is equally frightening. Compounding those fears is exhaustion from dealing with multiplying messages and user inboxes. Those factors make overwhelmed government technology officials desperate to quickly plow through the spate of e-mail management tools now on the market.

Sifting through all the solutions can be tricky. Initially, the market had two broad vendor categories: e-mail archiving companies and system performance management providers.

Now, archiving players — notably storage, records management and security giants with solutions that relegate messages to separate, searchable file stores — sometimes add server monitoring functionality. Smaller system performance management providers are further blurring the lines with lighter-weight archiving capabilities. Their tools monitor the health and capacity of e-mail servers.

To most government buyers, however, the need to solve immediate problems and plan for future e-mail growth is more important than classifying vendors. So IT officials are now looking at products from large and small vendors.

For instance, Venango County wanted a quick-hit solution.

“We needed to produce an e-mail for a court case, and we couldn’t do it,” said Bill Kresinski, the county’s MIS director. “That’s what really did it for us.”

Venango County uses C2C’s Archive One Compliance Manager software to bolster compliance efforts and enforce e-mail policy retention.

Regulatory triggers
Just as agencies must stand ready to produce electronic communication for litigation purposes, they must also contend with various state and federal recordkeeping policies and regulations.

That’s what prompted officials at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, who expect archival requirements to increase in the future, to look for an e-mail management solution that could help them comply with regulations more effectively.