GWGuardian and GWExtranet Contribute for Highly Available Collaboration at Splendora ISD
Executive Summary
Over two years ago, the Splendora Independent School District deployed GWGuardian from Messaging Architects to resolve email security issues without dedicating valuable time and resources to managing the problem. The same strategy towards simplicity and efficiency with regards to collaboration led the Splendora ISD IT group to implement GWExtranet. As a result, the nightmare of coordinating events and dedicating resources across the school campuses through an endlessly long spreadsheet was channeled to a single GroupWise account, made instantly available to everyone in the community, and in the process hundreds of hours of unnecessary browsing through hundreds of calendars were saved.
Background
Splendora ISD has a student population of about 3,300 serviced by a staff of 500 teachers , administrators, and auxiliary personnel. The school district consists of 5 campuses: 2 Elementary, 1 Intermediate, 1 Junior High School, 1 High School, as well as an Alternative Education Program and an Alternative Academic Academy. From an IT infrastructure perspective, the school district owns the whole spectrum of the Novell product suite – from its flagship GroupWise collaboration system to Zenworks for automated network management.
GWGuardian: Eliminated the need for babysitting our spam and virus filters
When Splendora ISD turned to Messaging Architects’ GWGuardian more than two years ago, they were really in a tough situation. Their previous anti-spam product was seriously under-performing, blocking only about 80% of all unsolicited email; at the same time, too many false positives were getting through. On top of that, the product required too much effort and managing to keep the anti-spam filters up-to-date.
Chris Rodriguez, Network Manager at Splendora ISD, explains the situation before GWGuardian: "We were having way too many issues with the old product. When you are a K-12 institution, getting an 80% spam catch rate isn’t going to work. Users were flooded with unwanted email. Meanwhile, we would get calls from the staff telling us that legitimate email had been blocked, so we wasted a lot of time looking for those falsely trapped messages in the quarantine. We were spread thin trying to keep the product running, there was too much manual work required of us. We are three people doing all the IT work – we needed to automate the spam management as quickly as possible."
"When we came across GWGuardian, we decided to try it out. We tested it and we loved it. In addition, it came integrated with the McAfee engine to provide first-class anti-virus protection. The installation itself was quick and painless. The integration with eDirectory is great. Once we had everything set up and configured, we didn’t have to touch it any more. GWGuardian just works. In fact, it works so well I rarely have to check it – joking aside, I sometimes forget the name of the server it’s running on…"
Leveraging GWGuardian’s highly granular functionality, Rodriguez has offloaded all spam settings and quarantine management to his end users. They get daily quarantine reports and have access to the GWGuardian secure web portal through which they can modify their spam settings depending on their needs. There is no involvement on the part of the IT personnel.
"The GWGuardian quarantine reports and web portal are very useful," continues Rodriguez. "These two features have cut down tremendously on my workload. Before I used to spend a lot of time looking for blocked messages; now, if the users think that something they want has been trapped by the filters, they are able to look for the message and release it themselves. We've also given them the freedom to modify their individual spam settings. Naturally, we control the virus and forbidden attachment settings centrally."
"As a network manager, I consider GWGuardian a time-saving application that has brought numerous benefits to our institution. GWGuardian not only provides solid anti-spam and anti-virus protection for our GroupWise system, but it does it without requiring any effort from us. Considering that in the past two months about 120,000 of all the messages we received were spam GWGuardian stopped before they even came into our system, that’s a significant advantage. We just set it and forget it!"
"I would absolutely recommend GWGuardian to any organization that like us can’t afford to spend time managing email security. I can honestly say, drop whatever you have and get GWGuardian. It works 99% out of the box."
GWExtranet: Saves our admin staff hundreds of hours every month
With its multiple campuses, stadiums, auditoriums, and other resources, one of the time-consuming tasks the Splendora ISD administrative staff was faced with was coordinating their availability in a timely fashion and ensuring that there was no overlapping in their use.
Rodriguez remembers what a cumbersome process it used to be: "We actually had a dedicated person from the administrative staff whose sole job was going through hundreds of staff emails, printed letters, and appointments, and then entering and updating a giant spreadsheet with all this information to ensure that the respective resources had been properly allocated and there would be no overlapping."
"GWExtranet solved this problem once and for all – now we have different calendars for the various departments, the administration, and for athletic and sports events. Everything is managed quickly and efficiently through GroupWise; there was no need for any training since the product comes with templates that can be used out of the box. The person managing the resource allocation schedule isn’t very technical, but she started using GWExtranet as soon as we installed it."
"The benefits that GWExtranet has brought to the school’s collaboration system have been two-fold: on the one hand, it eliminated a lot of hours of unnecessary data entry from our administrative staff and freed up time for other responsibilities related to our commitment to provide the best possible service to our community. On the other hand, it enabled us to improve the communication between the School Board and the public and to provide information about events across the various Splendora campuses quickly and easily."
