Background
Davenport University aspires to be a world-class business school that excels in career preparation, career advancement, and professional development. Davenport teaches students to think creatively and recognize opportunity in a dynamic economy, as well as instills in them an appreciation for civic responsibility. The university has about 12,000 students and 3,050 faculty and staff.
For their collaboration needs, Davenport University uses Novell GroupWise. To maximize the investment in their email infrastructure, they use the Messaging Architects Security and Compliance Suite: the email security and compliance software ensures University employees are able to best service the students in a secure messaging environment and the institution is compliant with respect to access to information requests, as well as able to provide data quickly and easily in the case of legal discovery or internal audits.
Using Guardian Technology for Optimal Spam Protection
Davenport University has been using the Guardian anti-spam technology since 2001, after they replaced another product that was way too restrictive in its ability to control spam filtering.
Steven Tharp, Novell Server Manager at Davenport, talks about the circumstances that made the switch mandatory. “At Davenport there is an interesting dichotomy with respect to the end users of the email system. On the one hand, we have the enrollment staff that needs to be guaranteed that not a single false positive gets trapped. We are a private university and we actively pursue new registrations. Typically, the inquiries from potential students come from free email. Many spam filters trap such emails, erroneously taking them for spam. For the enrollment staff, however, such lost emails translate into lost revenue. On the other hand, the administrative staff is on the opposite end of the spectrum. They hate spam and can’t be bothered by even a single message. They insist on draconian measures when it comes to trapping unwanted email. So in the IT department we need to be able to allow messages that could be potential new student registrations and at the same time satisfy the administration by having the ability to provide very tight spam control where necessary. This is the flexibility that we are able to achieve with M+Guardian.”
In addition to the flexibility of M+Guardian, Davenport University values the fire-and-forget concept underlying Messaging Architects’ Guardian technology, designed to help IT administrators eliminate spam from their email systems with minimum administration. The appliance features a user web portal for real-time quarantine management by the users. This has reduced the overhead for the Help Desk staff, who no longer need to deal with handling spam.
“From an administrative perspective, there’s very little overhead. The product just works. The time when we upgraded coincided with the need to replace old hardware. Putting the M+Guardian appliance in production saved us quite a bit of money that we were able to reallocate elsewhere. Currently, we have 2 M+Guardian appliances running in a clustered environment and we’re planning to expand to 4 for better redundancy. The dashboards provide useful statistics about email traffic in our system and the amount of blocked spam. The end users are happy with the flexibility we’ve offered them and we’re happy with the fact that it’s a completely self-managed solution,” continues Tharp.
Mitigating the Risks of Email Retention and the Costs of eDiscovery with M+Archive
In July 2007, Davenport University deployed M+Archive to begin centralized retention of electronic records stored in their email system. Two primary factors were at the core of this decision: concerns about records retention from a legal perspective and internal requests for electronic discovery.
After changes in federal and state regulations officially classified email messages as official records, Davenport University consulted attorneys regarding their level of compliance and discussed the matter with all relevant departments, such as IT, Legal, and HR. It was agreed that Davenport would adopt a 100% email retention policy for a period of two years, after which it is automatically purged. The IT Department switched off native GroupWise archiving to ensure all email is retained in the central archive repository without any end-user intervention.
According to Tharp, “Even though as a private university the requirements for retention we face aren’t as stringent as in the case of public institutions, we wanted to tackle the problem proactively. It was clear that we could do more to preserve email in a centralized and automated way and we decided to go ahead and roll out M+Archive. M+Archive enables us to apply the necessary retention policies and automate the archiving process. I know that legally we’re in a much better position than we were before.”
The second driver for the M+Archive implementation had to do with improving the productivity of the IT staff in cases of internal eDiscovery. According to Tharp, before M+Archive retrieval of information on requests from HR for information on employees was lengthy and time-consuming. In fact, most of the time he had to recreate the email system and eDirectory in a separate environment from backup tapes. Then, he had to go through an extremely long step-by-step procedure to recover a single email, and most of the time the request was for more than one email.
“It used to take me up to 40 hours for each request; in other words, I would spend the entire week retrieving email. This wasn’t a good situation from a productivity point of view,” Tharp recalls.
The deployment of the archiving solution now allows Tharp and his colleagues to search and produce information in a matter of minutes rather than days and has eliminated the need for rebuilding entire Post Offices from backup.
The Bottom Line: A Secure and Compliant Collaboration System & Simplified Email Management
"Overall, we are very pleased with the email security and archiving solutions we selected from Messaging Architects as they have solved our problems: our email system is secure from the onslaught of spam without the risk of false positives, we are protected from a legal perspective and we are able to fulfill discovery requests quickly and easily," concludes Tharp.
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