GWGuardian Solves the Spam and Virus Problems for City of Den Helder
City of Den Helder is located in the northern part of Holland in The Netherlands and has almost 60,000 citizens. The city hosts tens of thousands of foreign tourists during the summer months and has developed a solid infrastructure in terms of hotels, pensions and bed & breakfasts, as well as museums, shopping centers and hiking and cycling routes, to address the needs of this important sector of the region'sconomy. About 700 municipal employees ensure smooth operations at the City of Den Helder. They rely on Novell GroupWise for their collaboration needs.
Similar to most other organizations relying on email as a primary means of communication, the City of Den Helder needed a solution to address the spam and virus problems of their email system. While they had another product in place, they were facing issues with it. Leen Visser, Information & IT coordinator at City of Den Helder explains: "We had real issues with the anti-spam and anti-virus product we were using previously. We wanted a solution that would integrate into our GroupWise environment. Novell Netherlands recommended Messaging Architects' GWGuardian, the solution Novell itself uses.
"We contacted the Messaging Architects EMEA office in Eindhoven, got all the GWGuardian information we needed via a web session and then we started testing the product. Immediately, we noticed a major improvement in our email system performance when compared to its state when were using the previous product. Since unwanted mail no longer enters our post office and prevents it from overloading, we have a more stable GroupWise environment."
Visser continues, "The pre-installed and pre-configured GWGuardian Appliance is a great solution. Because our email traffic runs through 2 different systems, GemNet for incoming email and a local default gateway for outgoing email, at first, we thought this might cause some installation problems with the GWGuardian Appliance, but we were wrong! Our system turned out to be more stable than ever. The benefits were noticeable immediately: GWGuardian has a very user-friendly administration console and we are also very happy with the possibility of adding additional keyword filters. We release the quarantine reports once a week and the end users are happy that they aren’t bothered by spam anymore!"
Visser concludes, "We are planning an update to version 4.3 of GWGuardian very soon. We are particularly pleased with the new GWGuardian WebAccess support. Since GWGuardian has proved such a positive experience for us, we are planning a pilot for GWArchive, Messaging Architects’ solution for email archiving and retention, next summer. As our archiving needs continue to grow, we’re very curious to discover the benefits GWArchive will bring to us."
