GWGuardian and GWExtranet Bring Secure and Reliable GroupWise Collaboration to a New Level at the College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Florida
The College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida is the state's only veterinary college. The school offers comprehensive service to the public through a fourfold mission: teaching, research, extension, and patient care. Since its first class that graduated in 1980, the college has built on the university's reputation for excellence. For collaboration between the faculty and the graduate students, the College of Veterinary Medicine relies on Novell GroupWise.
Currently, GWGuardian appliance is used to protect the school's email system from spam and viruses. Sommer Sharp, Infrastructure Manager at the College, explains the why GWGuardian has been such a successful solution for them: "Before GWGuardian, we were using other products that required way too much management. I had to spend hours a days configuring rules. In spite of my efforts, there were still lots of false positives while spam messages weren’t being caught. I realized I had to find a solution that would provide me with the right level of protection without requiring that I learn another programming language. Using GWGuardian has proved to be an excellent experience: pricing was excellent, we were able to set up a free trial and receive free support throughout the entire evaluation period. Moreover, the fact that this is a gateway solution is an additional benefit as it stops all unwanted email before it even gets into my system.
"GWGuardian works very well, it is really a fire-and-forget solution, and we seldom need to release anything trapped in the quarantine. Moreover, GWGuardian offers the tools that we have made available to our end users to allow them the freedom to decide what to release from their quarantine. As a result, they are happy with the system and I am happy because I don’t have to touch or tweak anything: everything is auto-updated, very little maintenance is required, GWGuardian does all the work and it works really well.
"Since October 18, 2005, GWGuardian has processed 1.4 million email messages, of which 789,000 were spam and 31,000 were viruses. A huge percentage of these emails were rejected by the GWGuardian filters on the level of parameter protection before they even had to be analyzed by the anti-spam engine. I'd recommend GWGuardian to any organization – its engine is robust and reliable. Moreover, since it is compatible with any SMTP-based email system, I am glad that we wouldn't lose our investment in GWGuardian, even if we do end up having to migrate to another email platform in the future."
In addition to GWGuardian, the College of Veterinary Medicine also uses GWExtranet to publish information directly out of GroupWise. Sharp continues, "GWExtranet is very useful for us: we have several calendars with various public activities and services that are made available online appointments can also be scheduled directly online. GWExtranet is an important collaboration tool for the Marine Mammals Fisheries Department, whose members are spread out and use a single GroupWise account to keep track of each other. GWExtranet makes the GroupWise calendar they are all using available to them through a single weblink.
"I am very happy that GWExtranet supports unlimited calendars and there is practically no learning curve for the end users as they are leveraging GroupWise for online collaboration. It’s an invaluable tool for academic organizations," concludes Sharp.
Sommer Sharp, Infrastructure Manager
College of Veterinary Medicine
University of Florida
