Douglas Education Service District Uses M+Archive
Douglas Education Service District Uses M+Archive to Offer School Districts in Southern Oregon a Cost-Effective and Simplified Approach to Email Archiving and eDiscovery
Background
Douglas Education Service District provides leadership and equitable, high quality, cost effective locally responsive services to school districts in Southern Oregon. Major resolutions and contract services include early intervention/early childhood special education, programs for orthopedically impaired, speech/language therapy, behavior consultants, consulting teachers in areas of special education, and educational, curriculum, and network services. DESD employs 109 full- and part-time administrative, confidential, licensed, and classified staff members who provide these programs and services to the thirteen school districts in Douglas County. Component school districts range in size from 151 students to 6,600 students. DESD staff are widely respected for their expertise, professionalism, and dedication to promoting student achievement.
Email hosting is part of the technology services portfolio offered by DESD to the schools in Douglas County. Thirteen different school districts and 2250 email users take advantage of the ISP service. As a value-added service to the schools using the email hosted service, which leverage the GroupWise email platform, DESD also offers hosted archiving to meet the regulatory mandates for email retention of the school districts. This is a full service that includes both the archiving software and the hardware system on which the archives are stored. To meet the email retention requirements of the educational institutions’, DESD uses Messaging Architects’ M+Archive and hosts all archives in a virtualized environment. This is a cost-effective solution for the participating schools as this approach relieves them from having to buy their own servers.
Using M+Archive to Host Multiple School District Archives
Several years ago, the state of Oregon came out with new archiving rules requiring the retention of all electronic communication related to business activities. At first the schools were reluctant to participate in the initiative afraid of the potential higher costs. About 2 years ago, however, a request for email was made from a political watchdog agency. Some of the schools which received the request realized they would be unable to produce the information. This event made most of the schools revisit the archiving issue and as a result DESD rolled out M+Archive to their environment.
EDSD developed an email retention policy for the school districts that opted to include archiving as part of the email hosting. Based on the state guidelines for the preservation of electronic communications, EDSD implemented 100% email retention of the sent and received email hosted on their servers. The archives are stored for a period of three years.
Since the implementation of M+Archive, EDSD has had a few eDiscovery requests related to internal investigations at some school districts, which in turn has validated the investment they made in the email archiving solution. A second benefit of having M+Archive was the ability of EDSD to provide staff and faculty leaving the system with a copy of their email.
"Before M+Archive, when people left the organization, we had no way of giving people their email,” explains Asthika Welikala, Network Administrator of DESD in charge of the email hosting and archiving. “Having the centralized archive allowed me to export it out on a DVD and give it to the employees leaving the organization. They could take their email with them and we would still have a copy here for regulatory reasons. That was a huge benefit and we are pleased that we have this ability.”
The individual school district archives are stored on Equalogic SAN systems coupled with VMware. This set-up provides each district with the ability to access and control their individual archives without the overhead of having to manage them in-house and the cost of having to purchase expensive hardware. Welikala points out, “Using our services saves each district at least $5000 they would have had to spend for a server and a storage system, so this set-up makes financial sense for the school districts.”
From a technical perspective M+Archive is quite easy to use. “The Messaging Architects sent a professional service team to have it deployed. He was very knowledgeable and in fact guided us through all the settings and configurations,” continues Welikala. “Our internal team was involved from the onset throughout the installation and putting the policies together. The Messaging Architects engineer explained to the whole group the logic of the policies, what to look for, what not to do. He was also very familiar with the GroupWise side of things and this really helped a lot.”
The decision to deploy M+Archive was also done with a longer-term vision in mind as EDSD may be switching to the Exchange email platforms in the future. With M+Archive, the ISP will not have to make any changes to its email archiving environment and the historical data from the GroupWise system will not be lost.
