GWGuardian and GWArchive Improve GroupWise Performance and Faculty Productivity at Athens State University
Located in northern Alabama, Athens State University prepares students for professional careers, lifelong learning, and enrichment through quality teaching, individual attention, and a varied course delivery system, assists students in the timely achievement of their professional and career goals. To ensure timely and efficient communication, Athens State University uses Novell GroupWise as its collaboration system. Currently, GWGuardian and GWArchive, two products by Messaging Architects, further contribute to maximizing the investment the university has made in its GroupWise-messaging infrastructure.
"We have been using GWGuardian for three years now and we think it is wonderful," explains Gary McCullors, Director of Information Technology at Athens State University. "A few years ago, I purchased GWGuardian to provide protection for our GroupWise system. I wanted a gateway solution that filtered for unsolicited email and viruses, and was self-maintaining. I got everything configured, turned it on and have loved it ever since. It works better than anything else I have seen. I am able to control connections, filter both incoming and outgoing mail, and readily stop unwanted messages that are always abundant at educational institutions. Once I had GWGuardian in place, the users immediately noticed a difference. In fact, one entire department called on speakerphone to thank me, in unison, for cutting their unwanted email from thousands a day to almost nothing.
"Having GWGuardian as a messaging firewall has cut down the amount of email that is stored on the GroupWise server. I also believe the productivity of our users has improved. They are able to access GroupWise faster and are spared the pain of having to sift through long lists of unwanted email messages. As far as I am concerned, GWGuardian is the best. GWGuardian gives me the ability to reject email for scanning based on entire domains or specific server addresses, making the system more efficient because it reduces the number of messages it has to filter. Thanks to this feature, I have cut down the number of unwanted messages quarantined on a daily basis from 15,000 to about 2000. That is over 10,000 email messages a day GWGuardian doesn't even have to waste time scanning and quarantining. This frees up a lot of time for processing valid email. Over the last few months, more than 1,000,000 connections were made to GWGuardian from external mail servers, less than 500,000 were accepted for message filtering, and less than 250,000 were delivered to a mailbox. I am so proud of GWGuardian’s performance and capabilities; I show it off to anyone who comes to visit our department. So far, not a single email virus has sneaked through. In fact, during January 2004 when all the academic institutions, and many commercial sites, were being hit hard by viruses, we did not get a single infection."
When the IT department decided to upgrade Athens State University from GroupWise 5.5 to 6.5, they wanted to ensure their end users had access to their old GroupWise 5.5 email after the upgrade, without having to move the all the email or maintain a GroupWise 5.5 system. For that purpose, they selected GWArchive, a GroupWise-native email retention solution with capabilities to automatically publish copies of a user’s GroupWise mailbox to a platform-independent XML-based file, which then may be accessed and searched globally by the respective user or by authorized records management personnel.
"GWArchive was easy to use and it allowed us to accomplish two things," continues McCullors. "First, we were able to export and publish all email from the old GroupWise system in order to comply with the requirements for email retention. Secondly, GWArchive simply allowed us to be nicer to our users – they didn’t lose their email during the upgrade and they didn’t have to do anything special to keep it. They were very happy to have their old email and access it through a familiar interface. In addition to the application doing everything we wanted it to do and needed it to do, it also has searching capabilities for easy discovery. The users, or administrator, can find specific email by searching on sender, receiver, subject, or content, just like in GroupWise. This sure makes it easier to find critical email when you have several thousands to look through. Having accomplished the first stage of the GWArchive deployment, we are preparing to complete the implementation and take full advantage of the capabilities of the solution," concludes McCullors.
Gary McCullors
Director of Information Technology
Athens State University
