New Berlin Public Schools District: Messaging Architects Suite Brings Increased Employee Productivity, Preparedness for Compliance and Overall Added Value to the GroupWise Investment
The New Berlin Public Schools District consists of 5 elementary and 2 middle-high schools and serves the educational needs of several thousand students from suburban Milwaukee and the vicinities of the state of Wisconsin. The school district has always distinguished itself with excellence in teaching and student achievements. In their efforts to achieve their academic goals and challenges, the faculty and staff at the New Berlin Schools rely on Novell GroupWise for messaging. Both students and teachers can take advantage of the numerous robust collaboration features of GroupWise.
Allison Thompson, the GroupWise Administrator at the school district, has her system set up in a way that students and teachers each belong to a separate domain. There are a dozen of GroupWise POs, one for each school in the district. As is typical of educational institutions, there is a high level of email traffic as the majority of communication at the schools now is dependent on email. Over the past 3 years, Allison Thompson has supervised the implementation of 3 solutions from Messaging Architects to ensure that her messaging system is enhanced to serve her organization in the best possible way. Below is a case study of how GWGuardian, GWArchive and GWExtranet contribute to optimize the GroupWise performance at the New Berlin School District.
"GWGuardian: Fire-and-Forget email security that just works"
GWGuardian was deployed as the New Berlin Schools' email firewall in 2002 to handle the serious spam and virus problems that the school’s messaging system was experiencing at the time replacing another product which wasn't able to handle the overwhelming spam volumes and required major involvement from Thompson. She had to manage all users' quarantined messages. "The overhead was unbelievable," she explains. "When I saw that with GWGuardian I could transfer the entire process of managing the spam quarantine to the users through the daily end-user reports, I was very pleased. This was the kind of solution I needed. The fact that I could customize the end user reports further to restrict what students could release while giving the staff greater freedoms provided me with the flexibility I wanted.
"I really like the different possibilities GWGuardian gives end users depending on their level of technological knowledge. For example, I have a few power users that use the GWGuardian online portal for real-time access to their quarantine, though the majority are happy with the daily reports they get in their GroupWise inboxes. As soon as I had GWGuardian deployed in my production environment, the end users noticed a difference. The biggest spam complainers were also the first ones to let me know that they were happy with GWGuardian. With GWGuardian I am able to provide my students superior anti-spam and anti-virus protection and at the same time ensure that my email system is fully secure.
"As an administrator, I am also very satisfied that I am not expected to do much to make sure that my system is protected. On a daily basis, about 3000 to 5000 messages end up in the GWGuardian quarantine, not to mention those rejected by GWGuardian's perimeter protection layers before they even make it past the firewall. I probably spend a total of about an hour a week just checking on GWGuardian. I really don't have to do anything as all spam and virus definitions are auto-updated and automatically applied. And it blocks all the spam. Overall, GWGuardian works really well for an environment like our and I would recommend this product to anyone."
"GWArchive: Ensures that the New Berlin School District is prepared for open records requests at a moment's notice"
As an educational organization, the New Berlin School District is required to address open records requests from the community. Being able to produce archived GroupWise records quickly and easily, without the pain that accompanies the need to restore an old GroupWise Post Office was the main driver for the implementation of GWArchive.
"We are pleased that we have GWArchive as an email retention solution that ties natively into our GroupWise environment and does its job," continues Allison Thompson. "We don’t get too many requests for information, but the important thing is that we are prepared. When there is a case of such a request, I can provide the required records with very little overhead. I am extremely pleased with the Wordlist Search that is part of GWArchive's advanced search features, as it allows me to retrieve all needed information in a single procedure. Once I find the records, I am able to save a copy of the subset of data and send it off to Human Resources, which then makes it available to the public. My system remains secure and I am able to provide excellent service to my colleagues."
"GWExtranet: Keeping the New Berlin schools and the community connected"
GWExtranet, the simple, yet smart application that dynamically publishes GroupWise calendar and folder information on the web is another Messaging Architects solution that helps collaboration at the New Berlin School District. GWExtranet is used to keep parents informed about what's going on at the different schools. It is also used extensively to announce athletic practice, games and sports events, as well as concerts and other special occasions.
"The templates are ready to use out of the box, so in reality GWExtranet required zero learning curve. Yet, it's a powerful tool that is also very beneficial to the parents as it allows them to remain involved with their children’s school life. What really makes GWExtranet a great product for schools is that it leverages the GroupWise calendar and makes all that information instantly available to anyone with a browser,” concludes Thompson.
Making the Most of Your Investment in GroupWise
GWGuardian, GWArchive and GWExtranet, coupled with the responsiveness and expertise of the Messaging Architects support team, have all contributed to helping Allison Thompson make the most of her GroupWise system and at the same time provide a secure and efficient collaboration environment for her end users. She is particularly pleased with the fact that was able to find a single vendor able to successfully meet her various collaboration needs.
