That’s the argument behind the launch of a new tool from Preservica designed to give authors of those documents an easier, more digital way to store them — and to meet information compliance requirements.
The company said that its Preserve365 product, an embedded archiving and digital preservation tool for Microsoft 365, now is in general availability in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
While many public records are created and maintained on Microsoft 365, archiving those documents often requires manual, labor-intensive work, a spokesperson for Preservica told Government Technology.
The new tool enables officials and employees to use what the company, in a statement, called “a single unified information governments strategy across the full records lifecycle without needing to learn and use separate vendor specific compliance, archiving and discovery tools.”
The tool saves documents in “trusted readable file formats” that can be quickly found even for decades to come, according to the company’s statement. That can help officials with Freedom of Information Act and legal requests, along with other tasks that involve archived data and documents.
“A significant number of public records are created and maintained in [the] state of Vermont’s statewide Microsoft 365 tenancy,” Tanya Marshall, Vermont’s state archivist and chief records officer, said in the statement. “Using Preserve365 enabled us to visualize a streamlined and seamless process for long-term digital reservation of permanent archival records — and with continued access by records creators — simply by applying a Microsoft retention label or selecting a file folder or individual record.”
Other government technology vendors also are trying to find more business via information requests and archiving. In one such deal, Granicus, which sells civic engagement software, bought GovQA, which focuses on public records and compliance workflows.
