MESSAGING aRCHITECTS SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE SOFTWARE CONTRIBUTE FOR HIGHLY AVAILABLE COLLABORATION AT IREDELL-STATESVILLE SCHOOL DISTRICT
Background
With more than 20,000 students, 19 elementary, 7 middle, and 5 high schools, as well as 4 non-traditional educational institutions, Iredell-Statesville Schools ranks among the 20 largest school districts in North Carolina. Firmly committed to high quality, Iredell-Statesville Schools serves as a model school district not only for North Carolina, but across the United States. For four years now, the 3500 teachers and administrative staff of the school district use Novell GroupWise for their email and collaboration purposes after the decision was made to migrate from Exchange. The overall experience with the GroupWise platform has been consistently positive. To make the most of their collaboration suite, the school district IT department has also implemented several software products from the Messaging Architects product portfolio, which ensure the employees’ secure and compliant messaging environment and enhance their overall productivity.
GWExtranet: A Simple Application for Managing All School Resources through GroupWise
Iredell-Statesville Schools solved the problem of managing its resources across multiple campuses by taking advantage of GWExtranet, a simple yet powerful application that dynamically web publishes calendar and folder information stored in one or multiple GroupWise accounts or resources. By creating different calendars for the various GroupWise resources – labs, AV rooms, etc – and assigning the respective proxy rights to the instructional technology personnel, the IT department established an easy process for managing the resources quickly and efficiently through GroupWise without the need for additional training of the people in charge.
M+Archive: Protecting the Iredell-Statesville School District against the Prohibitive Costs of Electronic Discovery
In July 2007, Iredell-Statesville Schools deployed a centralized email archiving solution in their GroupWise system. Mandated to meet the requirements of open records requests and aware of the potential ediscovery costs in cases of litigation, the IT Department designed and implemented an email retention framework. Based on consultations with peers and the Messaging Architects archiving specialist, the decision was made for 100% retention; preserving the archived email for a period of 5 years. Having had positive experiences with Messaging Architects’ security and web publishing solutions, they selected M+Archive as the archiving technology to allow them to be compliant and protected in cases of electronic discovery.
“Even though there is currently no state law requiring us to have email retention in place, we decided to implement email archiving in the school district’s email system. Having an archiving solution with the right search and discovery tools makes it much easier for us to recover email messages in the cases of open records requests and during litigation,” explains Rodney Neal, Director of Technology for Iredell-Statesville Schools. “In addition to being protected from a legal perspective, M+Archive has another big benefit for our employees. Before we started doing centralized archiving, the end users on the 2 GroupWise post offices that handled the various schools’ email traffic were restricted by mailbox quotas. We had set up a policy that would automatically expire any email older than 45 days. Obviously, the employees affected by this weren’t too happy. They had to manually manage their mailboxes and keep them below the allotted size. When an older message was requested, we would spend a lot of time recovering it from backup, which is a painful process. With the deployment of our archiving solution, both problems went away. We are able to find the needed information much faster and easier. We also eliminated the mailbox quota restriction for our end users and they no longer have to spend any time managing the size of their mailboxes or worrying that their email will be deleted.”
Upgrading to the Latest Guardian Release for Maximum Spam and Virus Protection
The Iredell-Statesville School District has been using the Guardian anti-spam technology since 2004. That’s when they switched to the Messaging Architects’ solution from another product that was costing them too much effort in administration with unsatisfactory results regarding the spam catch rate. Given the fact that between 85-90% of all email traffic received by the school district is unsolicited, this amounted to a considerable overhead for the IT department.
When M+Guardian was released in 2007, Iredell-Statesville Schools decided to take advantage of the option to upgrade to the new appliance. The Linux-based M+Guardian appliance continues the fire-and-forget concept underlying Messaging Architects’ Guardian technology designed to help IT administrators eliminate spam from their email systems with minimum time required for administration of the solution.
A dedicated Messaging Architects engineer assisted Rodney Neal with the upgrade, transferring all the previous user configurations to the new M+Guardian system. He assisted Neal in ensuring that the necessary services were properly running and that the gateway was working as designed. The process was quick and since the upgrade the new system has been running solid. Moreover, while in the past, end users hadn’t been given access to manage their spam quarantine directly, Neal is now allowing his employees access to the quarantine and the option to control their safe and block lists.
“We are very happy with the new M+Guardian appliance and so are our users. It’s protecting us against unwanted email which is growing every day as spammers get sneakier and more ingenious in their approaches. In general, my experience with Messaging Architects is very positive. We like their products and that’s why we are using three of them. We are also very satisfied with the level of support we have been given whenever we needed it,” concludes Neal.
