Sparta Area School District Case Study

M+Guardian Helps Sparta Area School District Provide Its Students, Teachers, and Staff Risk-Free and Uninterrupted Collaboration

Case Study

Client Since: 2006
Number of Users: 3250+
Product: M+Guardian

Objective: Scan all inbound and outbound email for spam, viruses and other security threats

Background

Located in Monroe County in Western Wisconsin, the Sparta Area School District is committed to providing all students a high quality educational experience and skills relevant to the 21st century. The Sparta Area School District’s staff is dedicated to providing the best possible learning environment for the students. Evidence of this can be found in a number of components, such as progressive curriculum, individualized instruction, unique charter schools, active student organizations, and outstanding special education programs. The School District’s local communities show their support for quality education by maintaining excellent school facilities and advanced educational technology. Twelve schools with 2,700 students and 550 teachers and staff make up the Sparta Area School District.

The District uses GroupWise as the email platform that ensures collaboration between the teachers and students. While email is not automatically provided to all students, it is granted to those who apply and make the case that having a district email is relevant to the educational process. All inbound and outbound email scanning is handled by Messaging Architects’ M+Guardian.

Ensuring a Safe and Reliable Collaboration Environment for the Sparta Area School District

For the Sparta Area School District email is critical element of day-to-day activities. Technology Director Mathew Toetz explains: “Email is so important for us we’re actually using the system for document storage. It wasn’t intentional, but it’s more likely people will use documents residing in GroupWise rather than storing them on local or network drives. The most widely used documents are those found in their email.”

The Sparta Area School District email system consists of two Post Offices handling staff and student email, respectively. All email coming in and going out of the school system passes through M+Guardian and is scanned for spam, viruses, forbidden attachments, etc. The IT department uses granular policies to block images from coming into the system, yet pictures are allowed to be sent out. At least 80% of all incoming email is spam that never reaches the users’ inboxes.

Technology Director Mathew Toetz explains the process of ensuring risk-free email traffic. “We have strict filtering policies that scan for all possible threats. The only restriction I haven’t enabled is filtering based on size. Otherwise, we are quite consistent in preventing the same type of content from going out as coming in. Historically, we didn’t use to scan outbound email. However, with the advent of thumb drives and other miscellaneous peripherals which allow my users to bring in things from the outside that normally would be prevented from coming through by the firewall, for a year now we’ve been applying content scanning policies on outbound email, as well.”

The School District has been using Messaging Architects’ Guardian technology for five years now. The upgrade to the Linux-based M+Guardian appliance was painless and almost transparent. “The appliance came to my door all pre-configured, we pointed it to the GroupWise system and it just started working,” says Toetz. “This is exactly what I want. I turned it on and I don’t want to tinker with it. It’s just doing its job.

All email users get a daily quarantine report sent to their GroupWise inboxes and they also have the ability to access their respective quarantines in real time. They are allowed to release messages stopped as spam; however, they don’t have access rights to release quarantined messages based on other policy rule violations. According to Toetz, in the course of the past five years, spam has become so minimal at the Sparta Area School District the majority of users don’t even bother with this option.

From a technical perspective the Guardian engine is doing an excellent job. According to Toetz, in the course of the five years since he’s been using the technology, he has made three adjustments to the engine: “For me that’s pretty minimal overhead requiring me to intervene,” he adds.

"We are one of the few school districts in the state of Wisconsin that actually offers email to students. We want our students to take advantage of technology but at the same time we want to make sure that this is done in a controlled manner. With M+Guardian we are able to do this,” concludes Toetz.

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