Redacting Confidential Information: Case Study

Screen-shot of the Victorian Department of Human Services websiteLike many such agencies, the Victorian DHS owns documents ranging from corporate transaction records to child protection cases. From financial and personal details to legal advice and other categories of protected and privileged information, the 1982 Victorian Freedom of Information Act requires the deletion of exempt material from documents prior to any release.

“We’ve used Redax to meet our FOIA obligations since 2005,” says Marc Dobber, Senior Policy Advisor for the Department of Health. “Before Redax, information protection was a slow, labor intensive and paper wasting process. Redax’s on screen markup allowed us to reduce our paper consumption by something in the order of 75% immediately.”

The Department uses many of the professional features of Redax everyday to get their work done.While they make some use of automated markup list files, due to the possibility of typographical error in original material, automated redaction is always supplemented by reading and manual mark-up.

“We compared Redax to other products, but none of the others currently available have the rich range of features that Redax does; in particular the document management aspects and the capacity to create palettes,” Dobber says. “It was also good to know just how much you stand behind your product. Communication with support and sales staff has always been cordial and helpful. Your support team outshines many much larger corporations’ offerings.”

Redax is not the only Appligent Document Solutions product used by the Department. “We have also used Appligent’s StampPDF Plug-in to allow for a common stamp template to be circulated and used. The advantage is that it sits in the same platform as Redax, and uses the same logic and is readily customizable,” Dobber says.

About the Victorian Department of Human Services

Responsible for community services and housing, the Victorian Department of Human Services is one of eleven state government departments in Victoria, Australia, with over 11,000 staff across 6 divisions and 8 regions. Visit the Victorian Department of Human Services website!

About Redax 5.0

Released in March 2011, Redax 5.0 celebrates 14 years of leadership in electronic document security with a major update to the most reliable and capable redaction technology for PDF files. While Adobe includes basic redaction in Acrobat Professional, it’s not as full-featured or workflow-friendly as Redax, nor does Adobe offer a server-based redaction solution like Redax Enterprise Server.

Thousands of national, state and local government agencies, law firms, corporations and institutions world-wide protect sensitive information with Redax everyday.

Redax 5 requires an existing installation of Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional 7, 8, 9, X, or XI. Redax will NOT work with the free Adobe Reader.