South San Antonio Independent School District

Securing and Archiving GroupWise Email

South Antonio Independent School District uses M+Guardian and M+Archive to secure and manage their email archives

Background
The South San Antonio Independent School District encompasses 21 square miles in the south and southwest portion of San Antonio. Portions of the school district adjoin Lackland Air Force base and Kelly USA. Approximately 10,000 students attend the school district, which consists of 2 high schools, 4 middle schools, and 10 elementary schools. Students are also enrolled in the Career Education Center and Alternative Center. The faculty and staff servicing South San Antonio ISD rely on Novell GroupWise for all their collaboration needs.

Eliminating Spam from the GroupWise System
The relationship between South San Antonio ISD and Messaging Architects began about 4 years ago when the school district deployed M+Guardian into their messaging system. Overnight, the nightmare of managing the onslaught of spam was eliminated with a solution that runs itself requiring zero administration.

Mary Welch, GroupWise administrator at the school district explains the situation: “We were flooded with complaints from end users who weren’t able to use email to do their job. They were receiving all kinds of phishing scams and inappropriate online offers. We needed to do something fast and we had to be efficient. I did considerable research and we tested several products extensively in-house. I wanted to be sure that the solution I finally selected would be powerful enough to save our email system from the thousands of unwanted emails. More importantly, I didn’t want to waste time managing it or tweaking spam filters. The anti-virus aspect of M+Guardian deserves some credit, as well. Since we implemented the gateway, we have had zero virus outbreaks on our network, which sets us apart from a number of surrounding districts, which have had to deal with a number of mass outbreaks in their networks. I attribute this to our deployment of M+Guardian at our gateway preventing any potential spread into our network. The M+Guardian appliance solved my problems once and for all. My end users are extremely happy they no longer have to deal with all the junk mail in their inboxes and I really like the ease of administration. This solution has worked really well for us and I would gladly recommend it to all my peers."

Being Prepared for Legal Discovery and Open Records Requests
In October 2006, South San Antonio ISD made the decision to adopt a centralized email retention policy and deploy an email archiving solution. To be on the safe side and to eliminate the need to rely on end user intervention, they opted to retain 100% of the email messages going through the school district’s email system for a period of 7 years.

“Even though we hadn’t been mandated by law to introduce email retention, we decided to be proactive and implement this project as we undertook the consolidation of our GroupWise Post Offices,” continues Mary Welch. “There had been several occasions already when I was asked to produce old emails and the process of restoring them from backup was a nightmare. It would take me half a day to finish restoring one account, not to mention the time spent looking for the email in question. Besides, relying on backup for electronic discovery purposes is a bad idea. Not only is it extremely time-consuming, but a backup is only good for a shorter period of time; then it gets overwritten. What happens if an older email is requested?”

Once again South San Antonio ISD turned to Messaging Architects for help. They were able to solve their need to be able to access and restore messages easily and quickly with a deployment of M+Archive. The M+Archive Policy engine allowed the school district to set the respective archiving policy that automatically provides 100% retention, thus enabling the organization to be prepared for any eventuality.

Initially, the main driver for the deployment of M+Archive was being able to comply with open records requests and cases of electronic discovery. However, M+Archive’s integration with the native GroupWise WebAccess interface, with which the school district’s teachers and staff are already familiar, will allow Welch to take advantage of M+Archive’s full capabilities and further reduce the overhead on her GroupWise message store. As a next phase of the archiving project, users will be able to review their archives directly from the archive repository keeping the school district’s email server highly available.

“By deploying M+Archive for our email retention management, we have certainty that we will be able to fulfill any open record request quickly and painlessly, as well as to produce email in cases of legal discovery without having to incur high costs or loss of time. GWArchive’s advanced configurations give me a lot of flexibility that I will be taking advantage of in the coming months” concludes Welch.