Support advice concerning Covid-19, January 2021
As we all come to terms with tighter COVID-19 restrictions, I’d like to take this opportunity to share the steps that we are taking to ensure that we continue to offer the levels of service that you expect from Footprint Solutions.
Our primary concern continues to be the health and safety of colleagues and their families, customers, our business partners and the local communities.
In accordance with the Government directive, our Head Office is now closed until further notice. Our staff have the technology in place to continue to provide exemplary support services remotely from home.
Our technology infrastructure will ensure we can operate our systems and processes remotely with no interruption to our normal service levels. This will ensure that we’re able to provide you with the same great levels of service should you need advice or support with any of our solutions.
Please note that from the close of business on Monday 4th January 2021 our Head Office switch telephone number will not be monitored. We will provide support services remotely but our Head Office will not be manned.
Our excellent support team are able to facilitate the following services remotely during this time:
- We will use remote telephony allowing continuous phone access to our teams
- Support requests should be raised via our website by clicking here. Alternatively email support@footprint-solutions.co.uk
- All tools for managing enquiries, quotes, order processing, etc. will be remotely accessed by our teams via laptops / PCs
- Various collaboration and conferencing tools would be used internally to work with our customers and vendors for productive collaboration and content sharing
- Live events and training will be either deferred or switched to virtual environments
As always, we remain committed to supporting your business with an excellent level of service. Our core hours of support will remain unchanged and consist of 09:00 to 17:00 Mon – Fri (excluding Bank Holidays).
If you have a support request, could we respectfully ask you to click the link below to raise a support ticket:
http://support.footprint-solutions.co.uk
If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to send us a mail support@footprint-solutions.co.uk
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation at this difficult time. Please continue to follow NHS advice https://www.nhs.uk/coronavirus
Stay at home and stay safe.
Kind regards
Footprint Solutions Support Team
Why GDPR will make e-Redact a
more critical investment than ever before.
On May 25 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became law. The regulation affects all member states of the EU and obliges them to be more accountable, transparent and responsible for the data they hold, process and share.
Information Compliance Managers, why your next hire should be e-Redact!
Do you struggle to complete your Freedom of Information workload?
Would you like to be able to process more requests without hiring more staff?
Does the quality of your team’s information redaction protect you against accidental information disclosure?
Do you worry about your photocopying and paper costs getting out of control?
If you answered yes to any of the questions above this means you are probably worried about quality, cost and service. The good news is we can help.
e-Redact has lowered the time taken for file redaction from an average of 90 minutes to under 8 minutes.
e-Redact will help you achieve much more with your existing resources.
e-Redact is the UK No. 1 document redaction software
Trusted by 1000’s of public and private sector companies
E Redact File & Document Redaction Software.
Since 2006, e-Redact has delivered an advanced document redaction solution for irreversibly removing confidential and sensitive information from electronic files, documents, scanned output, or any other information source such as a database report.
e-Redact processes electronic files from any source without having to have the file printed for manual redaction.
The software will search for phrases, regular expressions (i.e. a Date of Birth or Social Security Number) or subject names.
Why Removing Sensitive Information is important?
Before distributing the contents of a document you may wish to protect its content so that sensitive information remains confidential. Redacting information using e-redact cleverly removes the sensitive information by placing a black box over the contents but retains the contextual element of the rest of the document. The original is left untouched with an Adobe Acrobat pdf document being created of the redacted output.
It is physically impossible for third parties to retrieve the information by reverse engineering the redacted content.
Through the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ and the new “General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR), due to be enforced in May 2018, more organisations are using redaction software to safely remove sensitive content from documents. Although these are usually central and local government bodies more private businesses are using redaction software as a safe and secure method to keep personal and important documents secure. Removing sensitive information is a practical and professional way of making sure all documents that contain sensitive information are kept secure within your organisation, or in the public domain where anyone can view them. Redacting documents gives you the ultimate confidence that your sensitive information is secure when dealing with third parties outside your organisation.
Redaction Software for Government & Commercial.
For any government or commercial organization responsible for managing documents that contain private or sensitive information, the issue has become a double-edged sword: How do you comply with mandates which require you to protect sensitive data, while simultaneously complying with the Freedom of Information Act, the new GDPR, OIA and other laws that require you to provide access to documents requested by the public, employees or government officials. How do you do it efficiently and effectively in a “do more with less” environment? With e-Redact you have options.
Blanking out sensitive information.
Redaction, a different form of text editing for privacy, is the deletion of sensitive information in a document. It’s sole purpose is to allow the selective disclosure of information in a document while keeping other parts of the document secret. This means that a document is suitable for publication to the intended audience without revealing sensitive and private information of the original document.
During court cases some information that is not specifically relevant is often redacted.
Some documents, in whole or in part, may contain sensitive information or elements which are not subject to disclosure, examples being some telephone numbers or email addresses. The process used to do this involves blanking out certain parts of a document in such a way that the redacted information cannot be retrieved by a separate party by using ANY means. Using redaction software blanks out any sensitive information and prevents it being revealed. As a company it is massively important to take advantage of redaction software to increase, if not maximise, the security of confidential images and data used within your business.
A typical client will redact their daily volumes of files in just 20% of the time taken using manual processes, additional cost savings are also achieved from removing paper processing and photocopying from the redaction process.
e-Redact is quite possibly the UK’s most sophisticated document redaction solution. An average client will save 50% time efficiency from using e-Redact to prepare their Freedom of Information disclosure files.
A typical client will redact their daily volumes of files in just 20% of the time taken using manual processes, additional cost savings are also achieved from removing paper processing and photocopying from the redaction process.
e-Redact is quite possibly the UK’s most sophisticated document redaction solution. An average client will save 50% time efficiency from using e-Redact to prepare their Freedom of Information disclosure files.
Results Achieved
Subject Access Request turn-around in 31% less time
Achieved 84% time and financial efficiency improvements
Family Court disclosure times reduced by a staggering 52%
Information disclosure processes ran 49% more efficiently
51% time and consumable efficiencies achieved out of the box
Why you will love e-Redact
SIMPLE
User-friendly Interface with advanced tools built-in and out-of-the-box compliant redaction and pre-defined extraction/indexing content.
FAST
e-Redact works just like a human, only thousands of times faster and with far fewer errors.
POWERFUL
Complete and accurate removal of original data from both the image and text layers of documents group.
ACCURATE
e-Redact sets the benchmark in the redaction industry for accuracy – No other solution comes close.
FLEXIBLE
Configure specific workflow requirements and user-defined specifications, either automatically or manually.
INSTANT
Validate redactions, extracted case indexing data, and eFile acceptance at the same time!
Features that matter
The sectors we work with
Don’t just take our word for it!
e-Redact was launched in 2006 and is now considered to be the No. 1 redaction tool in the UK
by over 1000 public and private sector companies.
We have developed new tools and solution features whilst working in partnership with some of the uk’s highest-profile information security departments. We have been developing redaction software for almost a decade and e-Redact includes some of the most powerful automated search and redact features in the industry.
We meet regularly with clients such as the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National Archives to discuss how the solution can meet future legislation changes surrounding FOI, DPA and EIR.
50% time saving on our workload – Herefordshire Council
Consistently completing work in 40% of the time it used to take – Aberdeenshire Council
50% time saving across the department – Derby City Council
4 hours per day reduced to 40 minutes – Trafford Council
Process optimised from 14 hours to under 6 hours – Blackpool Council
Paper-based redaction has been converted to 100% electronic redaction and we save £60,000 per annum on print / copy / paper costs – North West Legal Firm
Family Court disclosure times reduced by a staggering 50% – Lancashire Constabulary
Some of e-Redacts clients
Take the e-Redact tour
Manual Redaction Tools
Manual redaction is the default mode of operation for e-Redact. The user is able to select the ‘Rectangle Redaction’ or ‘Scribble Redaction’ tools and manually redact over sensitive information. After completion of the manual redaction the user is able to apply an exemption code to the redaction (i.e. a Freedom of Information Section 40 code which indicates that the information relates to Personal Information).
Redacted Copy Files
e-Redact generates a Redacted Copy file leaving the original file untouched regardless of the source file format. This key feature is critical to ensuring that information is not leaked by accident post file redaction and the first stage of e-Redact processing is that the original file is ‘flattened-off’ and a temporary bitmap image is created thus removing any possibility of meta-data / hidden information being published from the original file.
Audit Copy Files
e-Redact includes the option to generate Audit Copy files that are specifically designed to make redacted file management an easier task.
The Audit Copy file matches the Redacted Copy file in it’s layout and positioning but replaced the fully masked redacted zones with a translucent mask, thus allowing the redacted information to be seen.
Search Term Redaction
e-Redact allows users to enter standard ‘Search Terms’ (i.e. a patient name) into e-Redact. When these terms are selected, the search terms will be automatically removed from the source file(s).
The user can then review the automatically applied redactions within the Working Copy file before approving them and generating the Redacted Copy and Audit Copy output files.
Bracketed Text Redaction
e-Redact allows users to remove any text contained within brackets in an instant with 100% accuracy. The user can elect to remove any information contained within (Round), [Square], or {Curly} brackets instantly and return a Working Copy file for the end user to approve the applied redactions.
Redaction Templates
e-Redact allows users to easily remove a specific area or zone of a standard document using a Redaction Template. Redaction templates are easily defined by opening the business document or form in e-Redact and defining the standard zones of the document that you wish to be removed. If appropriate the user can allocate Exemption Codes to the zones that will be redacted.
Annotated Text Redaction
e-Redact allows users to quickly and easily remove sensitive information from a paper-based or electronic file using text redaction. Text redaction is used when original information must be redacted from a document but an explanatory ad-hoc note may be helpful in describing why the information has been removed.
A good example of this may be the removal of an address from a letter as it may be a ‘Safe House’ used for protecting witnesses.
Exemption Codes
Exemption codes are pre-defined reasons for information redaction that are governed by central bodies such as The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Exemption codes are used by information managers when it may not be appropriate to disclose certain information. An example would be the Freedom of Information Section 40 code which related to the removal of Personal Information from a document or file before issue as part of an FoI information request.
Graphical Stamps
Graphical Stamps are simply images that can be loaded into the e-Redact Solution and used whilst applying redactions to the Working Copy file.
Our clients find these useful as they can indicate that a file is ‘Under Review’ or ‘Final Copy’.
Working Collaboratively
Redaction of files can be a subjective task and the e-Redact collaboration features allow users to work together to verify redacted content prior to release.
Accidental information disclosure usually occurs when an individual has not understood the content of a given document and critical sensitive information is left unintentionally within the document that is due to be released.
