Success Stories

GWAVA, a Montreal based company, leader in the market of GroupWise Novell solutions

GWAVA works with our current anti-virus software to meet all our requirements for securing GroupWise 6 mail services for the benefit of Northwestern Michigan College faculty, adjunct faculty and staff.

Dan Wasson,Coordinator Systems and LAN Management Northwestern Michigan College

Background

GWAVA, Inc. is a leading developer of server-based solutions designed to protect and secure electronic collaboration. GWAVA has a global presence with a worldwide network of resellers and has created a strong technology partnership with Novell, as indicated by the company’s Professional-level membership with Novell DeveloperNet® and YES, Tested and Approved™ certification for its GWAVA (GroupWise Anti-Virus Agent) product. “GWAVA is a company uniquely focused on eSecurity software for Novell GroupWise, notes Charles Taite, Chief Technology Officer for GWAVA. “GWAVA made a conscious decision to invest resources in Novell and its GroupWise platform. Thanks to Novell and DeveloperNet's invaluable assistance, we have been able to build GWAVA: a tightly integrated YES Tested & Approved eSecurity solution for GroupWise. The rapid adoption of GWAVA, and the very positive response from the GroupWise community is proof-positive of the value of working with DeveloperNet and Novell's YES Testing program to develop high-quality solutions for Novell platforms."

Situation before GWAVA solution

Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) is a community college which provides a quality education environment for more than 4,000 full and part-time students. In addition, NMC’s mission is to provide learning opportunities to the communities it serves, including continuing and non-credit education programs, and affiliated programs with Michigan universities. For NMC’s mail system administrator, dealing with viruses and spam is a significant job responsibility. Each day brings a flood of junk e-mail, messages with obvious and not-so-obvious viruses attached, and increasingly, messages with large files such as MP3s and other media files attached, presenting system management headaches, and consuming system bandwidth and storage capacity.

Dan Wasson, NMC Systems and LAN Management Coordinator, has worked with Novell GroupWise® since the product’s early WordPerfect* days. He remembers when life was simpler for administrators. “Our group supports 550-600 GroupWise mailboxes to meet the collaborative needs of NMC faculty, adjunct faculty and staff. That’s always been the easy part,” he quips. “GroupWise just runs. It’s the other stuff that’s been problematic.”

Our end-user desktops are constantly being exposed to Microsoft-targeted viruses and worms, and the problem continues to grow in complexity and severity,” Wasson observes. “We implemented McAfee Virus Scan just before the Code Red/Nimda episodes in 2001, so we’ve been lucky with virus outbreaks so far. But viruses are always growing more sophisticated, and the number of large files and junk e-mails kept increasing to the point that we decided to fully address the problem in 2002 with a tightly integrated GroupWise solution from GWAVA.”

Situation after GWAVA solution

GWAVA is a powerful anti-virus (AV) and eSecurity agent with a full suite of content filtering, attachment blocking, and anti-spam tools. GWAVA decrypts and exposes internal and external GroupWise e-mail for standard anti-virus scanning. In addition, GWAVA offers robust e-mail filtering functionality, helping organizations control large file transfers, and blocking spam and viruses at the network edge. “The primary reason we chose GWAVA was to extend our current anti-virus protection with extension blocking to stop unwanted or virus-infected email from getting to end users in the first place,” says Wasson. “Viruses, spam, and large e-mail file attachments are an ongoing problem, even in our GroupWise environment. GWAVA works with our current anti-virus software to meet all our requirements for securing GroupWise 6 mail services for the benefit of Northwestern Michigan College faculty, adjunct faculty and staff.”

Although GroupWise isn't impacted by viruses nearly as much as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, organizations still need a complete virus-protection solution for their GroupWise systems. GWAVA works with leading NLM-based AV solutions to provide additional protection from viruses. GroupWise stores all email messages in an encrypted database. Since traditional virus scanners are unable to scan encrypted data, they are unable to completely protect the NMC e-mail system. GWAVA helps NMC’s McAfee AV software protect GroupWise and the entire network at a deeper level than otherwise possible. Because GWAVA identifies and quarantines e-mail messages for scanning, it prevents the spread of viruses at a lower level in the network, such as from post office to post office. For administrators, GWAVA provides security, flexibility and rapid response capabilities at the center of a GroupWise mail system. “

Basically, GWAVA keeps everything bad away from our GroupWise end users and provides much more protection at the network edge,” explains Wasson. “For example, GWAVA’s attachment blocking options let us stop specific filenames—as well as wildcard filenames and types—particularly useful in stopping Visual Basic Scripts (*.VBS). And to keep our users informed when an e-mail is blocked by GWAVA, it sends a notification to the addressed recipient of the blocked message and also creates a log so we can check to see what types of files are being blocked. This high level of protection made it even easier to justify a site license for GWAVA.” “

GWAVA’s chief technology officer, Charles Taite, was a big help in getting us up and running,” notes Wasson. “For example, when we installed GWAVA, we had some problems configuring the software. Uptime on the NMC network is 7 am until 10 at night, and we can’t do anything during that time. I called him at 10 o’clock in the evening and he stayed on the phone with me until the issue was resolved. His high level of commitment to customer satisfaction is typical of my experiences with GWAVA.”

Conclusion

“We are very happy with GroupWise 6, and GWAVA makes managing the system easier by keeping us in control of our overall messaging environment,” says Wasson. “NMC is currently running GWAVA Standard version 1.5. But we will move to the latest version soon to leverage new features such as Fingerprinting and Anti-Spam Heuristics. Some e-mail users know changing a file extension can sneak the file past our current attachment blocking measures. GWAVA’s Fingerprinting feature opens files to verify file types, and can even stop items such as MP3s that have been renamed as other file types.” GWAVA is winning customers with development to Novell. And NMC’s email administrator is winning the messaging security battle with GroupWise and GWAVA. Concludes Wasson, “For other administrators who want to lock down their GroupWise systems, reduce administrative headaches, and greatly improve the collaborative experience for their end users, my suggestion would be to evaluate GWAVA.”