M+Guardian & M+Archive Add Value to GroupWise at Oconomowoc Area School District

The Oconomowoc Area School District consists of 1 high school, 1 middle school, and 5 elementary schools. It serves over 4400 students and has 500 staff members. The District relies on GroupWise 6.5 for its collaboration needs. "I don't like viruses, so I will stick with GroupWise," explains Dan Klamert, Network Manager, also in charge of the email system. An upgrade to GroupWise 7 is planned for the spring.

Klamert has relied on Guardian technology for anti-spam protection since 2005. The spam problem expanded since the school district started using the web as a means of interacting with the community. It got worse when staff email addresses were published on the weband unfortunately harvested from the website by spammers.

"We were using another product that was simply not doing the job: it wasn't catching enough spam and what is worse, it was giving too many false positives and users were complaining. The Superintendent wasn't getting emails from the School Board. There was constant administration and upgrades that needed to be applied for the product to function. And still it wasn't catching enough spam and at the same time was blocking too much legitimate email. In short, we had a real pain before we decided to go with Messaging Architects’ product. Prior to Guardian, I had to go through the false positive database on a weekly basis; it was a great burden on me, given the fact that like in any other school district the IT staff isn't large. I don't have time to manage spam and that was what I ended up doing constantly since users were routinely asking me to release their legitimate messages. The low spam catch rate and the unacceptably high false positive numbers were the main reasons I decided to look for an alternative. I attended BrainShare the previous year and already saw a demo of Guardian. I also spoke with colleagues at other institutions about the products they were using and more and more Guardian seemed to be the answer.

"I can definitely say that M+Guardian is all around the best solution. The appliance came pre-configured after I had submitted a configuration sheet with all the relevant network information. I did minimal testing, as the appliance was pretty much ready to go. The implementation was easy. The support team was very helpful with any questions I had."

Klamert is particularly happy with the M+Guardian features that provide great flexibility to allow end users to control their spam level filters according to their preferences and needs: the quarantine reports and the real-time web portal. "Both are great tools, fairly easy to use and they save me a lot of time. I don't have to manage the quarantine for the end users any longer. I prepared some brief documentation for the users, outlining for them how to use the daily quarantine report and real-time web portal. What users really liked, as well, was that they could log onto the web portal using their GroupWise credentials and they weren’t required to remember yet another password.

"As soon as we put Guardian in place, users noticed a difference – people came to me to tell me that they had noticed a tremendous improvement with the spam situation. After so many frustrations, false positives became a non-issue. Right now, my end users are happy and satisfied and as a result I am happy and satisfied.

"As an IT professional, I am tremendously appreciative of the solution: with the appliance I don't have to do anything, it's been a life-saver and a tremendous productivity booster with all the time it has saved me NOT having to manage spam. We also use the AV engine and attachment blocking to further enhance our internal security. The M+Guardian appliance is really an email firewall that keeps all the junk and unwanted mail out of the GroupWise system. Thus, GroupWise doesn't process email it doesn't have to."

Recently, Klamert decided to address the important issue of email retention and deployed M+Archive in the school district's system. "Unlike Guardian which we implemented because we needed a better solution immediately, the decision to deploy M+Archive was completed a few months later. With M+Archive we were being proactive, introducing a complete solution for email retention, which would make us prepared for open records requests and other legal discovery before such requests actually took place. Now I have the peace of mind that should we need to produce an electronic record, we are ready to do so quickly and painlessly. We made sure to inform everyone that we are now compliant with respect to email retention. "I would highly recommend the Messaging Architects solutions," concludes Klamert.

Dan Klamert
Network Manager
Oconomowoc Area School District
Wisconsin