Request for council members' emails rife with difficulties
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From The Longmont Times-Call: Request for council members' emails rife with difficulties
The Times-Call submitted a Colorado Open Records Act request March 24 for all e-mails from each Longmont City Council member’s account, giving the city until April 4 — seven more days than the three required by law — to round up the messages.
Longmont city clerk Valeria Skitt said that when her office received the newspaper’s request, she planned to burn each council member’s e-mails to a disc. But that didn’t work with some accounts. So Skitt told council members that either they could forward their e-mails to the public inbox — at city.council@ci.longmont.co.us — or employees would do it for them if they provided passwords to their accounts.
Didn't work with some accounts? Hmmm...
Once the city finished the Times-Call’s open records request, how to get those files in a usable format also became an issue. Because the city uses Lotus Notes and because all the e-mails were sent to the public inbox, burning the messages to a disc wouldn’t do any good because the files wouldn’t be viewable on a computer without Lotus Notes.
The city can convert the e-mails to a text file, but doing so bogs down each e-mail with lines and lines of coding. Still, it was the only workable option, so the city gave the Times-Call a disc with the e-mails.
On that disc was one, 53-megabyte, 20,664-page document containing the text of the e-mails — a document the Times-Call still is combing through.
Let me get this straight... They spent 11 business days fulfilling this request by sending counsil member emails to a public inbox, then still resorted to converting the emails to a large text file for final presentation???? And this is blamed on Notes?
Let's see... All documents, Select All, Print All Documents in View, Print to a PDF driver...
Am I missing something here???
From The Longmont Times-Call: Request for council members' emails rife with difficulties
The Times-Call submitted a Colorado Open Records Act request March 24 for all e-mails from each Longmont City Council member’s account, giving the city until April 4 — seven more days than the three required by law — to round up the messages.
Longmont city clerk Valeria Skitt said that when her office received the newspaper’s request, she planned to burn each council member’s e-mails to a disc. But that didn’t work with some accounts. So Skitt told council members that either they could forward their e-mails to the public inbox — at city.council@ci.longmont.co.us — or employees would do it for them if they provided passwords to their accounts.
Didn't work with some accounts? Hmmm...
Once the city finished the Times-Call’s open records request, how to get those files in a usable format also became an issue. Because the city uses Lotus Notes and because all the e-mails were sent to the public inbox, burning the messages to a disc wouldn’t do any good because the files wouldn’t be viewable on a computer without Lotus Notes.
The city can convert the e-mails to a text file, but doing so bogs down each e-mail with lines and lines of coding. Still, it was the only workable option, so the city gave the Times-Call a disc with the e-mails.
On that disc was one, 53-megabyte, 20,664-page document containing the text of the e-mails — a document the Times-Call still is combing through.
Let me get this straight... They spent 11 business days fulfilling this request by sending counsil member emails to a public inbox, then still resorted to converting the emails to a large text file for final presentation???? And this is blamed on Notes?
Let's see... All documents, Select All, Print All Documents in View, Print to a PDF driver...
Am I missing something here???
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Comments
Posted by keith brooks At 15:52:24 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
Posted by keith brooks At 15:55:20 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
Certainly there appears to be lots of room for improvement in what they did though, but hell hath no fury like an unjustified assumption.
Posted by David Gursky At 16:16:59 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
Or, more property:
"Because the people involved are morons..."
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 16:17:00 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
@4... I like your interpretation better. Heck, they could have even downloaded a trial version of Notes, full-text indexed the dbs, and gone to town.
Of course it would have likely taken them 11 business days to find where to order or download one. :)
Posted by Duffbert At 16:36:28 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
Posted by David Gursky At 17:13:28 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
Lemme ask you this Tom -- if the attachments are password protected, then what? Not the Notes message itself, but the Word or Excel document. Don't poo-poo it -- I've been there. It's not easy. I am not saying this is the situation here, but rather in the general case, this problem really is not as straight forward as it might seem.
Posted by David Gursky At 17:22:50 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
Either way, this sounds like a "solution" thought up by someone not terribly qualified or tech-savvy, and the public paid for it.
Posted by Duffbert At 17:33:21 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
They could have easily created a merged mail file copied all in there set to reader and left it on webmail with a FTI.
Posted by Keith Brooks At 18:29:23 On 14/06/2009 | - Website - |
Can't read it? Nope. Notes is available to ANYONE, FOR FREE TRIAL from developerworks. As long as the databases aren't encrypted, you can read them with any ID.
Say Warren, who had this exact conversation with a customer last week, regarding users moving onto new companies and wanting to take their mail with them.
Posted by Warren Elsmore At 01:43:35 On 15/06/2009 | - Website - |