Relationship with Messaging Architects Brings Added Value to the St. Cloud Technical College Collaboration System

Background
SCTC is built on a solid foundation of excellence that combines the dedication of its executive leaders, the competence and creativity of its faculty and staff, and the high caliber of its students. As an academic institution, SCTC has always put students first, including by providing a solid, reliable and highly available collaboration system.

Securing the SCTC Email System across multiple domains from a single point of administration with M+Guardian
When St. Cloud Technical College decided to implement anti-spam protection campus-wide, they needed a comprehensive security solution that would have the capability to manage multiple email domains within the college IT infrastructure. There are approximately 5,000 GroupWise and Netmail accounts that need to be managed annually with minimum IT overhead. In the past, they had been able to manage both incoming and outgoing email with a single domain. The technological advancements and growing collaboration needs at the institution, however, had compelled the IT department to add additional email domains.

At the beginning of 2008, SCTC upgraded their anti-spam solution to the M+Guardian email firewall.

Gary Rehnke, MIS Director at SCTC, talks about the college’s requirements and how M+Guardian was able to address them: “M+Guardian sits between our firewall and the email servers. It provides us with a single point of administration to manage the multiple domains simultaneously. The Messaging Architects support team was very responsive and competent in helping us transition from the previous version of the product, ensuring that all settings and policies were preserved.”

The upgrade to M+Guardian went smoothly and quickly. Following a checklist with specific settings that was submitted to the Messaging Architects support team based on which the M+Guardian appliance was preconfigured, the upgrade was scheduled and carried out. Rehnke highlights some of the advantages he sees the new Linux-based appliance has brought to his users. “The appliance just keeps running and requires limited maintenance. I rarely have to touch it and it protects the email systems as designed. In my mind, the Linux operating system underlying the M+Guardian appliance manages the resource allocation more efficiently. With the previous version of the product which ran on Windows, I had to reboot the server from time to time to overcome some issues with CPU and memory management. I don’t need to do anything right now.”

The daily Quarantine Reports that is sent out to the faculty and students allows them to release any blocked emails they want to receive. This M+Guardian capability is very useful for educational institutions that need to adhere to freedom of information principles and thus are required to have highly flexible spam filters. With the exception of viruses and forbidden attachments, users get all the email destined for them. This gives them the ability to decide on the type of spam-like messages they may or may not want to receive. All end users appreciate the flexibility that the new M+Guardian Quarantine gives them and the fact that they have the freedom to decide what they can receive or block without having to involve the SCTC Help Desk.

This is good news for the College’s IS Department, as well. The team is able to provide superior service to the faculty and students without having to tweak settings or spend valuable time managing policies and spam filters. “We are pleased that we can manage our end users’ email accounts with very little overhead. Typically, about 95% of all email we receive hourly is spam. The M+Guardian anti-spam engines have made our job at the IS Department much easier if we compare it to other product we used previously when spam management was a tedious daily task that required a lot of time managing it. With the Guardian technology we have been using, this burden has disappeared. I have also noticed that the new M+Guardian is able to manage content filtering even better than the previous version and I like this improvement.”

Rehnke discusses the benefits of M+Guardian from a total cost of ownership perspective: “M+Guardian is an excellent investment for us, as it allows us to manage multiple domains with a single server license. Beyond the cost savings, however, from an administrative perspective, the benefits are even more obvious: we have virtually eliminated spam management of our email systems and transferred this task to the end users. There are no more phone calls from students or faculty complaining that they didn’t receive their email. Since we introduced M+Guardian, we’ve had numerous users provide positive feedback on the product. Empowering users with the ability to manage their own quarantine in accordance with their specific standards regarding email gives them a sense of security. M+Guardian has worked extremely well and I would highly recommend the product to schools or businesses looking for a policy-based single point of administration for multiple-domain email management.”

Being prepared for the challenges of open records and discovery requests while attaining storage optimization with M+Archive
Gary Rehnke‘s positive relationship with the Messaging Architects team prompted him to look at and implement M+Archive at SCTC. The archiving solution addresses multiple issues, such as email retention, compliance with open records requests, fast and easy discovery of email records, readiness in cases of litigation, as well as a dramatic reduction of the GroupWise message store.

"People keep email for an indeterminate amount of time. Without a serious archiving solution, all the messages would reside in the email system. We wanted to avoid having to deal with storage issues, but we didn’t want to introduce user space limitations, as this is never a popular decision. M+Archive has offered us the possibility to maintain a centralized archive repository that is much more secure for the archived messages. The solution is working very well for us and allows us to meet the demands from different department, as well as address requests for access to information from the public. With M+Archive, we are able to ensure compliance and peace of mind for our institution both from a legal and an end-user satisfaction perspective,” concludes Rehnke.