Black Horse Pike Regional School District

Deploying an email retention & e-discovery solution

Messaging Architects' professional services team helps Black Horse Pike School District deploy a solid framework for email retention and discovery

Background
The Black Horse Pike Regional High School District in Camden County, New Jersey, consists of three high schools with 4200 students and 550 teachers and administrative staff. The schools rely on Novell GroupWise for collaboration and timely communication between students, teachers and parents. With the changes in how email records are being perceived by the courts over the past few years and the fact that email systems effectively contain the bulk of all public records in the educational system, the Black Horse Pike Regional High School District made the decision to introduce an email retention policy and an archiving solution that would capture, retain, and make email archives easily available upon request before this became mandatory by the state.

Proactively Addressing Open Records Mandates
The decision for an archiving solution at Black Horse Pike Regional High School District arose as a result of the changes in the nature of how email is being perceived and the fact that in many cases email messages can be subpoenaed in cases of legal discovery. Moreover, educational institutions need to have the ability to access electronic records when requested by the public.

Donato Schiraldi Jr., Network Support Specialist at Black Horse Pike School District, explains what motivated them to approach the challenge of email archiving proactively, “As an educational institution, we are aware that email constitutes an electronic record that can be subpoenaed during litigation. Being able to find the respective message in minutes rather than days was something very important for us, considering the fact that our resources are limited. We needed to be compliant and we wanted to keep up with technology. We knew Messaging Architects as a strong Novell partner, which made us look at their solution. M+Archive not only met our needs from a policy and retention perspective, but was also very attractive price wise.”

Easy Design and Implementation of Email Retention with the Professional Services Team
The implementation of the archiving solution selected by the Black Horse Pike School District IT Department included an audit of the school’s email system by a dedicated Messaging Architects Professional Services engineer and a walk-through of the M+Archive retention capabilities. The engineer worked with Mr. Schiraldi to ensure that the GroupWise system was ready for the M+Archive integration and that the necessary configuration had been properly set up. Some GroupWise-related issues that arose were identified and overcome quickly, and soon the collaboration system was up and running with the archiving component working as designed.

“Working together with the Messaging Architects team was excellent. The engineer who assisted me with the implementation was knowledgeable and professional and we were able to complete the deployment without any stress or unpleasant surprises. In fact, the M+Archive integration with GroupWise was one of the smoother IT integrations we had in 2007. Overall, we are very pleased with the choice we made as M+Archive allows us to be compliant without much overhead and the experience with the Professional Services team has been very positive,” concludes Schiraldi.