East Grand Rapids Public Schools
Tackling Email Record Retention and E-Discovery
East Grand Rapids Public Schools proactively tackle email retention and legal discovery mandates to ensure peace of mind and compliance
Background
East Grand Rapids Public Schools is located in the heart of a small neighborhood community in western Michigan. Three elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school provide approximately 2800 students with strong, challenging academic programs, excellent opportunities in the arts, and over 100 athletic state championships. The East Grand Rapids Public Schools uses Novell GroupWise to ensure successful collaboration between the teachers and administrative staff.
Proactive approach to meeting the challenges of discovery requests with M+Archive
As email retention in public organizations is no longer a recommended, but rather a mandatory requirement, in 2007 the East Grand Rapids Public Schools IT Department decided to evaluate the implementation of a centralized archiving solution for their GroupWise messaging system. With the clear understanding that such a project goes beyond the scope of IT and requires the collaboration and involvement of various departments, the IT group approached all the stake-holders to understand their needs and to identify the risks and liabilities of their environment. Having gathered the preliminary information, they designed an email retention policy for the school system, using as basis the guidelines of the state of Michigan, which recommend that relevant information stored in the school’s email system be preserved for a period of 7 years. Another important requirement was to capture the email that had to be retained in an automated way that would not require retention management on the part of the end users. In December 2007, the IT Department deployed M+Archive.
Jeff Crawford, Manager of Networking and Security at East Grand Rapids Public Schools talks about the selection of the product, “We have known Messaging Architects as a company specializing in GroupWise enhancements for a long time. What really weighed in for the final decision in selecting M+Archive was the fact that it was the GroupWise solution listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. This fact was the differentiator for us.”
Once M+Archive was deployed in the school system, all GroupWise users were notified of the new retention policy. The archiving process makes use of M+Archive’s policy engine which allowed Crawford to set up a selective retention policy for automatic classification of the messages based on content. This approach allows him to preserve the relevant information, while discarding transient email messages that have no value to be kept in the archive repository. The archiving solution addresses multiple issues, such as fast discovery of email records, easy recovery of accidentally deleted emails, compliance with open records requests, readiness in cases of litigation, as well as a reduction of the GroupWise message store. Another benefit of having M+Archive according to Crawford is that it enables the IT Department to provide exiting employees with an export of their email on portable media.
Crawford explains, “In addition to helping us meet the email retention mandate, M+Archive has also proved to be an invaluable tool that allows us to make former employees leaving the system very happy. By getting an export of their email, they have access to previous correspondence and they don’t have to recreate their contacts from scratch. They get a portable CD with the M+Archive Viewer and this allows them to view their old email if they are moving to a different collaboration platform.”
As an administrator of the M+Archive server Crawford is pleased with the product’s tight API-level integration with GroupWise and the robustness of the corporate viewer which allows for granular and highly accurate archive searches.
"As the technical person in charge of the email archiving system, I appreciate the features M+Archive has, such as the XML format for storing archives, the simple web-based administration, the native API calls to the GroupWise system, the flexibility of the regex-based tools, and the robustness of the searching features of the corporate viewer. I am excited to see the new enhancements as M+Archive continues to evolve. As an educational institution that is always budget-conscious we have all the confidence that we will get the return on our investment in M+Archive very soon,” concludes Crawford.
