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Background
The Grand Junction City Government is recognized for its civic excellence. Employees are proud to work in an open, supportive environment where they are empowered to create solutions that meet or exceed the expectations of the citizens they serve. To enhance end-user productivity, ensure a secure and compliant collaboration environment, and maximize the investment in its email infrastructure, the Grand Junction Information Technology Division relies on Messaging Architects’ product portfolio.
The City of Grand Junction Information Technology Division supports all computer and telecommunication for all the City departments, including the Novell GroupWise collaboration system. Over the years, email has become the primary and most crucial channel of communication and collaboration for the City.
“Email is really the most important means of communication,” confirms Richard White, Infrastructure, Security & Support Services Supervisor at the City of Grand Junction. “If the phone system happens to be down, it may take a bit of time before my team gets notified; if email is down, we instantly know about the problem. That’s why we’ve dedicated our efforts to ensuring that our collaboration environment is reliable, secure, and compliant.”
Protecting the Email System from Inbound and Outbound Threats with M+Guardian
Similar to other public agencies, the email traffic that goes through the municipal system is burdened by an ever-growing amount of spam that tries to eat up system resources on a daily basis. According to White, as much as 89% of incoming daily traffic constitutes spam or other internet-borne threats, such as viruses and phishing scams. For years now, the City’s email system has remained secure and highly available thanks to M+Guardian.
From a cost perspective, Richard White rates M+Guardian very highly. Not only does M+Guardian protect the City employees from spam, junk mail and all kinds of other risks, but by stopping these unwanted messages at the gateway, it saves the City on the storage systems needed to meet email retention requirements.
Furthermore, the appliance requires minimal management efforts, which is another benefit White highlights. “I doubt I spend even 1% per week on M+Guardian. The City employees manage their personal spam quarantine settings and the appliance runs on its own. Occasionally, I will log into release an item an end user isn’t authorized to release. In general, however, I receive the M+Guardian reports, I glance at them and that’s about the extent of 'management' I am involved in with the product.”
Proactively Minimizing the High Costs of eDiscovery with M+Archive
In the past year, the City enhanced its collaboration infrastructure by deploying M+Archive, Messaging Architects’ comprehensive email retention and eDiscovery solution. While there were several drivers for the decision to implement archiving, the main reason was to have the City prepared for potential cases of eDiscovery.
For the City of Grand Junction, M+Archive solved the need for automated long-term centralized email archiving and minimized the risks of costly discovery. Prior to M+Archive, eDiscovery was a long, cumbersome, and inefficient process. The Legal Department would identify the corpus of data they needed, approach the individual end users, and have them search for the information.
“A few years ago we did an estimate as to how long it would take to do a manual search for some records requested by Legal and it turned out that it would take us up to 30 days to find the information. It included email and files, but 30 days is a lot of time to dedicate to a single discovery request. The reality is, we haven’t had that many requests so far, but we follow what’s happening and we see that more and more email is being requested to be produced in investigations and other circumstances, and we want to be prepared,” says White. “With M+Archive, it’s very convenient to manage everything related to email retention policies and search requests from a single central interface.”
Email messages are retained for different periods of time, varying from 2 to 10 years, depending on the nature of their content and the various retention schedules the City of Grand Junction has in place. Once the threshold is reached, the messages undergo automatic deletion. The message lifecycle management is carried out through the collaboration between the Records Manager, on the policy side, and the IT Division, on the operations side.
One thing Richard White wants to stress is how crucial M+Guardian is for the successful execution of the City’s email retention policy. With close to 89% of the email constituting spam and the mandate to retain all email received by the City for at least 2 years, it is clear that M+Guardian provides the City of Grand Junction with direct savings with respect to hardware for storage. In fact, according to White, they wouldn’t be able to meet their email retention guidelines without M+Guardian.
Making the Most from the Collaboration Environment with M+NetMail and M+Extranet
In addition to M+Guardian and M+Archive, the City of Grand Junction also uses Messaging Architects' M+NetMail and M+Extranet.
M+NetMail is a scalable lightweight messaging system. In the case of Grand Junction, it complements the GroupWise system and provides listserv capabilities for the City. All public lists are housed on the M+NetMail server from where information is disseminated accordingly.
Similarly, the City of Grand Junction makes information stored in GroupWise available to the public by means of M+Extranet - a simple yet powerful application that dynamically publishes calendars to the web without the need for additional end-user training.
The Bottom Line: Successfully Preserving Public Resources and Improving End-User Productivity
The City of Grand Junction has been working with Messaging Architects as the solutions provider for their messaging needs. This approach has been successful for the City both from a technology and an operations perspective. The products interact well with each other and GroupWise, and that has been very helpful for the overall simplified, efficient, and cost-effective management of the City of Grand Junction’s email system.
“Using Messaging Architects’ security, compliance and collaboration solutions, the City of Grand Junction IT professionals are able to preserve the City’s resources and ensure uninterrupted activity of the messaging system while improving the employees’ productivity and disseminating information across the community with minimum IT overhead,” concludes Jim Finlayson, Information Technology Manager at the City of Grand Junction.
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Overview
To enhance end-user productivity, ensure a secure and compliant collaboration environment, and maximize the investment in its email infrastructure, the Grand Junction Information Technology Division relies on Messaging Architects’ product portfolio: M+Guardian, M+Archive, M+Extranet, M+NetMail.
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