The idea it'd take four years to get these systems in place is ludicrous. Laughable. Comical. Ridiculous. And so like the government. But the United States Government is capable of amazing accomplishments, and capable of doing them with speed.

The entire Manhattan Project took just four years to develop the first atomic bomb. Surely we can install a few archive servers in considerably less time. After all, we don't have to develop them or research them. There are a large number of excellent solutions on the market today.

In fact, a great selection such off-the-shelf solutions is available from Microsoft's archiving solutions page. While not all are perfect for the EOP, there are certainly quite a few that'll do the job quite nicely and, I'm sure, deliver working solutions to the White House, if only for bragging rights, within a few months.

Conclusion
This has not been a period of progress in our efforts to repair the systemic problems of White House email. In fact, it's been somewhat demoralizing.

White House email is very problematic and, instead of productive action, we're seeing our Washington friends -- even those charged with ultimate oversight -- ignoring very practical solutions and instead spinning their wheels, at the expense of both present day Americans and the historical record.

What offends me as an IT professional is that none of these problems are insurmountable. In fact, most of them are easy to solve. What's worse: not a single private-sector CIO would be allowed to get away with negligence on this massive scale.

And yet, the White House has been allowed to simply disregard compliance with both the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act, apparently with no penalty.

Perhaps it's time to move this case out of the hands of Magistrate Judge Facciola and District Court Judge Kennedy and into the hands of a Special Prosecutor.

After all, we now have an official statement that email is missing. The net result: two key federal laws, Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act, are being violated by the White House. And the White House has admitted as much.

Dan Velasco is a Senior Technical Editor for WebSpherePower Magazine and DominoPower Magazine. He's a Sun Certified Java Programmer, Sun Certified Web Component Developer and an IBM Certified Solution Developer for WebSphere Studio V5.0. He's also a Principal CLP Application Developer (R4, R5 and ND6) as well as a CLP System Administrator (R4 and R5). You can reach him via email at dvelasco@webspherepower.com or on the Web at http://DanVelasco.com.