GWGuardian from Messaging Architects Ensures a Solid Messaging Infrastructure at Grand Rapids Public Schools
Grand Rapids Public Schools is Michigan's third largest school district. Following its guiding principles of openness to the community and high productivity in its commitment to providing a high level of education to its 22 thousand students, the Grand Rapids Public School district leverages the power of Novell GroupWise to achieve collaboration across the various schools, as well as the community at large.
Before GWGuardian, there was no anti-spam solution in place to protect the GroupWise users from the onslaught of unsolicited mail at the Grand Rapids Public Schools District. The implementation of GWGuardian in fact served two functions simultaneously: it replaced the existing anti-virus product we were using before and at the same time deployed an anti-spam engine to contain the huge volumes of spam that typically plague the email systems of academic organizations.
"It made sense to use GWGuardian," explains Ruth Michels, Network and PC technician at Grand Rapids Public Schools, whose department maintains the infrastructure of the entire school district, including the email system. "There are a number of reasons why I think it’s a great solution but what I really like about it is its flexibility in allowing me to grant end users the ability to manage their own quarantine and specific preferences related to spam filters. For my department, this translates into less administrative overhead for the staff and dramatic savings in time. I like the fact that end users can access their spam quarantines both through the quarantine reports that are emailed directly to their GroupWise accounts or in real time by logging through the web portal. The quarantine reports are really easy to customize to get the look and feel of our school templates.
"After GWGuardian started protecting our GroupWise system, the 3000 email users immediately noticed the difference. They no longer had to deal with messages they didn’t want while the GroupWise system didn’t have to process email that was never intended for us. In fact, GWGuardian stopped close to 45 thousand messages in the first two weeks it was on our production server.
"I would also like to mention that the support team at Messaging Architects has been great – they were friendly, knowledgeable, helpful and responded very quickly to my questions during the evaluation period. In fact, getting above average support was one of the main criteria I had when evaluating and selecting an anti-spam vendor. I have been very satisfied with the level of service I have received from the Messaging Architects support engineers so far.
"This is an excellent anti-spam and anti-virus solution that I can recommend to any educational institution. It is easy to deploy and there is virtually no management required. Everything is automatically updated. I love GWGuardian – it just works," concludes Michels.
Ruth Michels
Network & PC Technician
Grand Rapids Public Schools
