The Building Department for Nassau County, Florida, does as one would expect – it enforces Florida building codes both commercial and residential.

Easy, right? Not when you are talking about 650 square miles in sunny Florida!

The Challenge
Each and every structure in Nassau County must be reviewed by the Department, issued a permit and inspected. Ultimately, the aggregated information is to be reported to the Board of County Commissioners.

For over 30 years, the Department has been accumulating paper documents for each building in the county. The documents are all shapes and sizes, and generally include hardcopy plans and architectural drawings, inspection tickets, permit copies, miscellaneous communications and any other documentation that may be associated with the property. For a single hospital, the documents can number in the hundreds.

By 2005, five large buildings, scattered in different locations, were dedicated to storing these documents. The need to convert and archive these documents in a more manageable fashion became quite clear when many started to fade, yellow, and degrade in overall quality. In addition, Building Department employees were facing up to a 10 minute or longer drive in search of a piece of documentation that needed to be retrieved.