City of s-Hertogenbosch Case Study

City of 's-Hertogenbosch, a Leading Centre of Industry, Education, Administration and Culture in The Netherlands, Ensures Uninterrupted Collaboration with M+Guardian

Case Study

Client Since: 2008
Number of Users: 2400
Product: M+Guardian

Objective: Provide employees with the highest level of email security and spam protection.

Background

Colloquially known as the city of Den Bosch, the municipality’s official name of 's-Hertogenbosch’s is a contraction of the Dutch “des Hertogen bosch” ("the Duke's forest") referring to Henry I, Duke of Brabant, who founded the city in the mid-twelfth century. Today, Den Bosch is a centre of industry, education, administration and culture. It is home to many national and international businesses, such as Heineken, Tyco International and others. As a cultural centre, it hosts a variety of events, such as theatre and music festivals and high-profile sports events, among which the 1996 start of the Tour de France. The city has a professional football club, a top-ranked field hockey club, a basketball team EiffelTowers Den Bosch and the 2008 national rugby champion The Dukes.

To ensure excellent service and timely communication, the city’s 2400 users, who are distributed among 20 different locations, rely on Novell GroupWise. Like any public agency, the collaboration with the community needs to be unhindered by the ever-increasing volume of spam. For a year now, the municipality of Den Bosch has been relying on Messaging Architects’ M+Guardian to provide its employees with the level of email security and protection against the nuisance of spam.

Selecting M+Guardian as the City of 's-Hertogenbosch’s Secure Email Gateway

Paddy Verberne, technically responsible for the network, was in charge of the project for rolling out an anti-spam solution in the city’s messaging infrastructure. M+Guardian’s implementation was part of a bigger operation by the municipality’s IT department to reduce unwanted email. To streamline and optimize the messaging infrastructure, old email addresses were gradually phased out and replaced by new ones. They also implemented an automated no-reply mechanism for a more efficient handling of the email traffic.

Verberne talks about the selection of M+Guardian over other products that were considered: "M+ Guardian is a strong and versatile product. It can be used as a front-end for many email systems. It’s easy to implement and manage and does a very good job at filtering spam and other email-borne threats. The feature that set M+Guardian apart was the fact that it’s platform-independent and non-intrusive. We didn’t have to make any changes in our GroupWise environment; all that was required was a change of the DNS MX records.”

Currently, the city has a 2-node M+Guardian setup which is hosted by Messaging Architects. "This setup is ideal for us, as we don’t have to spend too much time maintaining and monitoring the solution, while still having enough control to be able to configure things the way we want to”, explains Verberne. “The level of support provided by the Messaging Architects’ teams has been exceptionally good. We value the close relationship with the company.”

One of the key considerations for getting management to accept the solution was that its implementation wouldn’t require for end users to change the way they were used to dealing with email. Deploying M+Guardian in front of the City of 's-Hertogenbosch’s email system was transparent for the end users. They weren’t required to adapt to M+Guardian in any way, while the appliance was protecting the end users from unwanted messages and numerous potential email-borne threats.

"M+Guardian is a flexible yet effective and powerful piece of software to gain good control over unwanted email. Because it can be installed with little or no impact on what end users experience, it was a good solution for us to get started blocking unwanted email in our organisation. I’m convinced that soon most of our users will also start using M+Guardian's additional anti-spam features to best suit their needs because at least for the next few years spam is on the internet to stay.”, concludes Verberne.

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