Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department Reduces Discovery Time by 70 Percent with Mimosa Systems Unified Archiving Solution
“The determining factor in our selection of Mimosa is that it perfectly helps to simplify our Exchange environment. It doesn’t place any load on the Exchange server and we only need to backup the archive.” — Doug Blackburn, Systems Programmer Analyst, Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department

Background
The Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department is a large, multi-faceted law enforcement agency composed of approximately 4,000 staff members and over 800 reserve personnel. The Department consists of five organizational functions divided into 20 divisions. The core services provided by the Department are: public protection, jail operations, technical services, and administrative and support services. In addition to patrolling the unincorporated areas of Orange County, 12 cities in Orange County contract with the Department to serve as those cities' police departments. The Department also provides security services for many agencies in Orange County including Orange County including the Orange County Superior Court, John Wayne Airport, Orange County Transportation Authority, Social Services Agency, and Health Care Agency.

Business Situation
As a very active sheriff’s department for one of the most populous counties in California, the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department must process numerous requests for electronic information in support of internal affairs, court cases, and public and internal investigations. Because much of the department’s communications are performed via email, these eDiscovery requests were putting an increasing strain on the IT administrators who support the department’s Exchange email environment.

Without an email archiving solution in place, the sheriff’s department was performing all of its email discovery manually. A typical request could take as much as 100 man hours to complete as researchers would comb through email, line by line, searching for specific words, phrases, or content to meet the discovery request. In an effort to eliminate hours of lost productivity, the Orange County department began to evaluate email archiving solutions that would solve the eDiscovery needs of its 4,000 mailbox environment.

“We were using an Outlook search tool that could find emails based on a phrase or word, but looking through our server data as well as searching through each employee’s local PST file, custodian by custodian, was taking an exorbitant amount of time,” noted Blackburn. “Now the eDiscovery search process is reduced substantially. The system looks through multiple accounts at the same time and flags items of interest – all with less IT resources.”

The Mimosa NearPoint Solution
The Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department was introduced to Mimosa NearPoint at a local Microsoft event. The IT staff was impressed by NearPoint’s ease of use and architecture that wouldn’t impact the performance of its Exchange servers.

“The determining factor in our selection of Mimosa is that it perfectly helps to simplify our Exchange environment,” said Blackburn. “It doesn’t place any load on the Exchange server and we only need to backup the archive. This enables us to perform online backups of Exchange without any interruptions, which makes our overall email environment much more efficient and easier to manage.”

Yet, what was equally impressive to the sheriff department’s IT team was NearPoint’s ability to automate time-consuming eDiscovery processes while assuring that all critical email data was captured and searchable from the archive. This clearly positioned NearPoint as the ideal solution for the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department as it would instantly improve productivity and eDiscovery accuracy.

Results
As a result of its new email archiving solution, the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department reduced its eDiscovery response time by 70 percent. Also important, was the ability for Mimosa NearPoint to meet its eDiscovery needs without adding any impact to the performance of its Exchange server. Because NearPoint doesn’t put any load on the Exchange server its overall email environment is much healthier.

Key Mimosa NearPoint features of value to the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department include:

• Next-generation architecture: Mimosa NearPoint's unique architecture does not require journaling or any agents on either the Exchange Server or user desktops. This ensures that there is no impact on the sheriff department’s production Exchange Server’s performance.

• Efficient eDiscovery: Mimosa NearPoint has several features that expedite the eDiscovery process by leveraging complete content capture. These features include individual item-level legal holds, conversation and proximity analysis, and an intuitive search within a search—while demonstrating chain of custody as archived content moves through the eDiscovery workflow.
• Continuous capture and smart extraction of exchange data: When an eDiscovery or disclosure request is made, Mimosa NearPoint quickly identifies relevant content, including all metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks.

“We were using an Outlook search tool that could find emails based on a phrase or word, but looking through our server data as well as searching through each employee’s local PST file, custodian by custodian, was taking an exorbitant amount of time,” said Blackburn. “After finding and implementing the comprehensive email archiving solution from Mimosa, now the eDiscovery search process is reduced substantially. The system looks through multiple accounts at the same time and flags items of interest – all with less manpower.”

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