Case Study: e-Docs USA, Inc.

FileAudit Case Study by Sam Brinly, Director of Technology at e-Docs USA, Inc.

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History

e-Docs USA has been providing customized document imaging and archiving solutions since 1999. We started out in the healthcare industry, but now provide scanning solutions a wide variety of clients (including education and manufacturing).

The Problem

Until recently, we provided all of our clients with a robust document management system. The built in functionality of these systems provided the auditing that we needed to ensure regulatory compliance.

In the past few years, we have encountered new clients with simpler needs. These new clients (typically smaller facilities with minimal IT infrastructure) desired an affordable solution that would provide them with simple archiving and retrieving functionality.

To accommodate these clients, we developed a module for our scanning application to store and retrieve files to a network shared folder. Although this solution met the client’s requirements, it complicated the file access auditing process. Windows is capable of logging file access to the event log, but managing and deciphering these event messages is a cumbersome task.

After some research and testing, it became clear that the development effort involved in creating an in-house solution was not trivial, so we began looking for a third party solution. Our requirements were simple; we needed a cost-effective application that provides an easy to read daily report of all file access to a set of Windows directories.

IS Decisions’ Solution

After evaluating a few products, we thought we found a good match with FileAudit 3. Some of the other evaluated products were either overly complicated, didn’t work, or too expensive for what we needed. FileAudit 3 was simple to install and configure and easy enough to use that we felt non-technical clients would have no problem.

During the first few days, we did have some initial questions, and we found IS Decisions technical support to be very responsive and helpful. After running the evaluation in-house for a few days, we noticed that IS Decisions was inviting users to a beta test for version 4, so we joined in. The new version offered many new features, but remained simple to install and configure. The most important addition for us was the ability to send daily file access reports via email. After initial setup, the software ran in the background with no interaction required.

During the beta test, the IS Decisions support and development staff were again very responsive and took the testers’ feedback very seriously. Many of the suggestions were implemented very quickly, and they have added some of the more complicated requests to their future development plans.

Once version 4 is completed, we intend to use it to replace our manual auditing process for our in-house NAS server and will be recommending it to any new clients that need a file system auditing solution.


Sam Brinly
Director of Technology
e-Docs USA, Inc.