Unique Needs

The American School for the Deaf has one GroupWise post office with about 500 users. GroupWise is available for the staff only; however, the campus is spread over 54 acres with 12 buildings and is open all of the time. Having a mobile group over such a large area and a mix of hearing and non-hearing impaired staff makes email critical.

Twiggy Girouard, Assistant IT Director – Network and Telecommunications Manager for the School, explains, “Because traditional methods such as phones and pagers do not work for our school, email communication is key for our staff. We can’t afford to have our system compromised.”

Sensitive to Spam

As a school, ASD is particularly sensitive to receiving emails that are inappropriate for children to see. With the GWAVA SMTP appliance stopping spam before it even enters the system and GWAVA’s other spam filters working inside GroupWise, Ms. Girouard is confident that these types of emails will not appear in their users’ mailboxes

GWAVA

GWAVA is the market leader for making GroupWise secure from spam and viruses. It uses the latest technology to protect your GroupWise system both at the perimeter and from the inside out.

www.gwava.com

http://www.gwava.com

No university wants to be investigated by the NCAA for violating recruiting regulations. But schools continue to make the news by discovering that one of their staff has made non-permissible text messages and phone calls. Illegal recruiting is a big issue and one that has traditionally been difficult to monitor and disprove.  

So how does a school police its own staff when it comes to text messages and phone calls from cell phones? GWAVA has the answer with Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. 

Steve Corder, Assistant Athletic Director for NCAA Compliance for the University of Detroit Mercy, uses Retain to track all cell phone usage by its staff. UDM is a small, private university in northwest Detroit with about 5000-6000 students. They are a Division 1 athletic department participating in 19 sports. About 60 staff use a BlackBerry monitored by Retain. Retain archives email messages and phone data into a secure server without compromising personal privacy. 

Achieving the Goal of Compliance

Installing Retain and getting it running was easily done by the internal IT department at UDM. Since there is nothing to install on the BlackBerry phones, implementing Retain did not disrupt any work or cell phone use. Staff members were initially concerned about privacy, but the university instituted a strict privacy policy. And since Retain for BES protects its users from unwarranted allegations, the benefits outweighed any concerns.

Once a month, the IT department at UDM runs reports to verify that none of their staff has illegally contacted recruits. The reports are based on the recruits’ phone numbers. Steve says that they trust their staff to follow the rules, but it is also important to be able to easily verify and prove compliance. “We have taken proactive measures to prevent any hint of a problem. Hopefully, we will never have to use this data, but we are prepared to deal with any situation that may arise,” says Steve. 

Retain is a Slam Dunk 

Steve Corder feels that Retain is a must-have for any university involved in athletics. Most universities don’t discover improper recruiting until long after the fact when it’s too late to rectify the problem. Even then, it takes long hours – even months - to locate and wade through paper records to find any potential violations. With Retain, the data is easily searchable and can be categorized, cross-referenced and verified within minutes.

 www.gwava.com

Scanning for Spam

Email Viruses Not a Problem at North Memorial

Compliments Instead of Complaints

About GWAVA

Retain’s easy install and speedy performance allays any fears about archiving becoming as troublesome as GroupWise tape backup. 

Overview

Monroe-Woodbury Central School District is a forward thinking, medium-sized school district in South-Eastern New York. Hugh R. Cauthers - Director of Information Services and his Assistant Director, George Armstrong, have taken the lead in transforming their district into one the most technologically advanced, forward thinking districts in the region. Monroe-Woodbury has deployed Novell OES in a virtual environment. This allows their 7500 students and 1400 staff to universally log in to any Macintosh workstation, authenticate through LDAP and using Samba, have their desktop, profile and document folders push down from the VM servers. Monroe-Woodbury was also the first district to fully implement an email archiving solution.

Why Retain?

Due to regulatory concerns Cauthers assigned Armstrong the task of finding a solution for e-mail archiving. They were specifically looking for a solution that ran on Linux, offered tight integration with GroupWise and would work in a VM environment. “The district is also in the process of moving as many servers as possible to Linux in a VM environment, in order to consolidate servers. With less servers we can be a little more “GREEN” friendly as far as power consumption of the single servers,” Armstrong pointed out. Having not purchased any GWAVA products before, Armstrong was encouraged by the close partnership between GWAVA and Novell. “The fact that Retain ran on Linux and could archive GroupWise on Linux was a definite plus. I tested it and it worked out-of-the-box, so we put it in place. Retain was definitely a plug-and-play solution,” explained Armstrong.

Challenge

Even though Armstrong knew he needed to find a solution to implement, he was concerned about the amount of work and management time that might result from another solution connecting into GroupWise. His concern was specifically derived from the extremely time consuming experience he had been having with his GroupWise tape back-up solution. “We really wanted something to successfully run in the background and be there when you needed it,” he mentioned. Success Retain runs five daily archiving jobs. They run two in the morning at four and six o’clock, one at noon and then two more in the afternoon at three and six o’clock. Users can even be logged into GroupWise without noticing any performance issues. The fact that there was no client piece to install was a big plus for MWCSD. Retain’s transparency allowed them to meet their requirements without involving the users. Armstrong is pleased with the seamlessness of Retain and feels that product has lived up to his expectations.

About GWAVA Retain

Retain is the only GroupWise specific archiving solution which, through SOAP, is fully customizable and is able to capture every single email that flows in and out of your GroupWise post-offices. To learn more about Retain, visit GWAVA’s web-site at: www.GWAVA.com/Retain

Background  

GWAVA is the leading eSecurity software for Novell GroupWise. Post office level scanning allows GWAVA to monitor all e-mail in GroupWise 6 to ensure communication is both virus and spam free. 

Compliance and Enforceability

Before implementing the GWAVA Retain solution, the two challenges facing the Mildred ISD were complying with the Freedom of Information Act and monitoring their email. Like all government agencies, the school district knew they had to get a system in place so they could archive all of their emails. If someone were to come and request to see email from a particular teacher or about a specific subject, they would have to give it to them. Complying with this Act was a top priority for them.They also had implemented email policies to assure that district email was only used for appropriate purposes. While these policies were in place, they didn’t have a way to monitor emails and enforce those policies.Fortunately, the Retain solution from GWAVA met both of these criteria. Now with Retain, they have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that every single email is stored and accessible at a moment’s notice. Retain also serves as a check and balance system since no email can be truly deleted or hidden. Even knowing that Retain is in place and random email checking is possible makes it less likely that email policies will not be followed. School administrators frequently use Retain to check up on emails. 

Affordability and Stability

For the Mildred ISD, price was a big concern. After reviewing his options, Daniel Domain determined that not only did Retain offer all of the features he needed, but it was affordable as well. Its price was much less than its competitors.Not only that, but Daniel had heard of GWAVA and knew of their solid track record with Novell and GroupWise integration.For him, running on a Linux server was also a big plus since he felt that the Linux environment was stable. Sure enough, the Retain software he installed in November 2007 ran through April without the need for rebooting. “It never stopped archiving or sending notifications,” Daniel explains. And then, the need for rebooting was not due to Retain, but the server.

Searchability and Usability

The Mildred ISD has been very happy with the usability of the Retain product. Anyone can locate archived emails easily. “All you have to do type it in and you can find it. Searching is very customizable,” says Domain. He has also been pleased with the support provided by GWAVA. They helped him through the setup and testing phases as well as helping him use the product.

Keeping Emails Legal

In Chicago, the intellectual property law firm of Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard & Geraldson LLP is especially mindful of the need to produce email in the discovery process. Email has become one of the primary means of communication and when a legal issue comes up, email is one of the first things that needs to be reviewed. As a law firm, they want to make sure that their emails and attached data are properly archived and easily retrievable.While everyone at the law firm would love to keep all of their email forever in their inboxes, it simply isn’t practical. Especially because nearly every email has attached documents. But still, old email and data needs to be accessible. For that reason, Pattishall, McAuliffe needed archiving software to provide quick access to old emails and support their retention and email retrieval policy.

Their Challenge 

Dale Qualls, Director of Information Technology for Pattishall, McAuliffe, explains that they use GroupWise 7.02 on a single server, running on NetWare and are moving soon to a Linux platform. There are about 90 users, but huge amounts of data being sent through the post office have bloated it to around 200 GB. All of their systems are running virtualized.  Dale explains that recent federal rules of civil procedure in the United States make it imperative that email be produced during the discovery process not only in archived or printed data, but in a mutually-agreed upon readable digital format. Gone are the days when the burden of unarchiving material fell onto the one requesting the discovery information. There are now specific rules on how to preserve data and how to present it as well. Discovery data now needs to be portable so it can be put into litigation support software, indexed and referenced.

Implementing an Archive Solution

In the beginning, Dale purchased an archiving solution other than Retain. With that solution, he had to purchase another copy of Windows Server 2003 and virtualize the software. He found that the archiving solution ran extremely slowly and inefficiently. Convinced there had to be a better option, Dale found an evaluation copy of Retain, ran it on a virtualized SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) box and was thrilled with how efficiently it ran. Now he had the portability he wanted and the speed and reliability of the virtual machines as well. Dale was pleased that Retain runs on native Linux since Linux is an easy, low-cost solution that works well. Not only that, but Retain runs on any platform, so you have a choice.Another plus for Dale is that Retain stores its archived data in a SQL database. SQL adds an extra layer of security. For example, if someone were to steal the hard drive storing the archived data, it would be much more difficult for them to access the data than if it were stored in XML.

Set It and Forget

It Retain has given Dale a confident outlook on the way the law firm’s archived data is stored. He doesn’t worry about a Windows server crashing and taking everything with it. For him, Retain is a “set it and forget it” solution. He gets progress reports on a regular basis which assure him that everything is running as it should and notifications if anything goes wrong. It runs by itself and there’s no need to worry or think about it.With Retain, both the law firm of Pattishall, McAuliffe and its clients are protected. They trust that they won’t be sanctioned by the court for failure to comply with the federal rules of civil procedure, which could cost them a great deal of money. Archive To Go which creates a pre-packaged disk with relevant data and a viewer makes it easy to provide searchable discovery data from Retain data. Plus, Retain’s web interface provides another way to access archived data securely and easily within the firm.

“One of the things I like best about Retain is the easy web interface. It’s smooth and easy to run through. It gives good feedback on how a job is progressing. Not only that, but GWAVA has some of the biggest names in GroupWise email working on their products.”

Dale Qualls, IT Director
Pattishall, McAuliffe 

About GWAVA Retain

Retain is the only GroupWise-specific archiving solution which, through SOAP, is fully customizable and able to capture every single email that flows in and out of your GroupWise post offices.

To help the IT department provide backup, quick restore and disaster recovery for GroupWise, they employ GWAVA Reload for backing up their GroupWise system. A recent scare illustrated the powerful backup and disaster recovery functionality of Reload.

One recent morning, de Beer saw the following error message on the server console of one of his NetWare servers: Server failed to boot.“We had a total hardware failure on our main domain and post office server that hosts mail for thousands of users,” he recalled. “The post office size was around 195GBs though all other domains and six post offices were still in place.”Complete panic set in as he first tried to “revive” the hardware at all costs, returning at 23h55, but still no fix. When this failed, the only fallback he had was their backups. “Luckily we were running Reload. I checked and saw that the last backup ran was the previous night, which was 100% as scheduled as part of our daily weekday schedule,” said de Beer.De Beer is quick to mention that for almost four years they did not have any backup and had been running Reload for only the last 10 months. “Imagine the scare I had.I already could see myself fixing PCs from home as my ‘new’ career.”

Panic Turns to Recovery

"I knew about the disaster recovery option from Reload, but hadn’t set it up before- always tomorrow - you know how it goes in IT, always something else that must be done now.”So, he reached out to GWAVA South Africa and asked for help. GWAVA’s Tay Kratzer, Reload Developer, was available. Kratzer helped set up the failed GroupWise post office to run on the GWAVA Reload server. Within a short time the failed GroupWise post office was running on the Reload box and de Beer’s users could access the post office again (after one DNS entry update).hey then kicked off the Reload post office migration feature but had no idea how long that would take. The pre-migration of approximately 90% of the data being migrated was restored from the NAS (NetApp iSCSI connected R200 device) the Reload server is connected to, to the production server in around 18 hours. The pre-migration migrated 175 GB of data.While the pre-migration of the post office was running, the post office was still up and functioning fully on the Reload server. The Reload server was also backing up other GroupWise post offices and domains that are regularly scheduled for backups each day. Once the Reload server had pre-migrated the data to the production server, De Beer then unloaded the live post office agent on the Reload server to start with the final portion of the post office migration (the last 10%). That was done in around three hours. Once this was completed, he installed the GroupWise Agent software to the production server and loaded the post office agent (POA). The post office was all up and running.“GWAVA Reload works brilliantly. If you are a GroupWise administrator, get yourself GWAVA Reload and set up disaster recovery for all post offices and domains before disaster strikes. Once it’s set up and tested it is merely a ‘flip of the switch’ while your users can work seamlessly and uninterrupted.

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Office of Physical Plant at Pennsylvania State University recently implemented GWAVA Reload for purposes of Hot Backups, Quick Restore and Push-Button Disaster Recovery of their GroupWise system.

Challenge

Prior to implementing Reload, the IT department had a difficult time getting a backup of their GroupWise post offices, because of their size.The third-party solution that they had prior to Reload was a snapshot style solution, which would take over 24 hours to backup their GroupWise post offices. Recently the Office of Physical Plant at Penn State implemented GWAVA Reload. With Reload, their post office backups take less than two hours. Because backup speeds are so fast, Penn State has designed their Reload server to perform backups of one of their post offices four times each day. This way, in the case of a disaster recovery event, their most recent backup is not old at all.

Quick Address Book Recovery

Within a couple of weeks of implementing Reload, a user lost their GroupWise personal address books. In a matter of a few minutes of effort, the GroupWise Administrator, Joe Laskowski, was able to restore the user’s GroupWise personal address books.

Customer Quote: 

“RELOAD has cut our backup times by 80-90%. I no longer have to cringe when users call to have messages or address books restored. It’s now a few clicks and done, instead of never having enough disk space to restore our entire post office. RELOAD is like an insurance policy for your GroupWise system.”

Joe Laskowski
Network & Information Systems Manager,
Office of Physical Plant at the Pennsylvania State University

No one likes to imagine the worst happening. Unfortunately, disasters do strike, whether man-made or caused by nature. And with electronic devices, catastrophic failure can happen at any time. Being prepared in case of an emergency is not only prudent, but essential. The State of Utah is constantly making sure that they are prepared for any event—retrofitting the state capitol building for earthquake safety and implementing disaster plans for all types of emergencies.

Solution

Once Reload was up and running, small problems users had from accidentally deleting vital emails were easily fixed by themselves. Mike rarely had to worry about email problems for the next two years. That suited Mike just fine since he had plenty of other things on his plate.

The Server is Terminated

In March 2007, Governor Huntsman's office was busy preparing for a visit from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The two governors would be discussing an interstate pact to decrease global warming. Many emails with plans and information for the event were stored on the GroupWise email server.On the Sunday night before Gov. Shwarzenegger's visit, the server volume housing the GroupWise domain and post office crashed. Mike and his IT team worked hard, but soon determined that none of the data on the server volume could be recovered, including the post office. Fortunately, Mike was prepared with Reload and knew he could switch over to the Reload machine. However, Mike knew he had installed Reload on a workstation for a quick solution and hadn’t yet upgraded to a bigger server. Reload would be put to the ultimate test. Was it up to running the domain and post office for the entire office for a couple of days on an inferior machine? Faced with no other option early on Monday morning, Mike decided to make the switch.Using Reload's push button disaster recovery option, Mike quickly got the Governor's post office back up and running on the single workstation machine that was never designed to run the entire GroupWise system. And Reload worked just fine, albeit a little slower than usual. Emails again started flowing to and from the office's myriad BlackBerries and critical information stored in users' emails was again available.Governor Schwarzenegger arrived, the meetings got underway and the whole day went smoothly. Soon, the interstate pact was signed by both governors.

Migrated in No Time

A couple of days later, Mike finished recreating the server volume and was ready to move the post office data from the Reload machine back onto the mail server. With Reload's migration feature, Mike was able to reload the majority of the data while GroupWise was still up and running on the Reload machine. Then Mike transferred all of the remaining data in a short, scheduled downtime, keeping email service up and running for most of the time.

Reloading on the Links

While on the golf course, he kept getting a call on his BlackBerry. He tried ignoring it, but the caller persisted. Realizing it must be important, he answered it to learn that a supervisor in another department had lost some critical emails. It turns out she had been “filing” her emails in the trash and didn’t realize that when the trash was emptied days earlier, the emails were gone for good from GroupWise. Because they had been deleted a while back, they weren’t showing up in the latest Reload backup she could access. She frantically asked Mike if there was any way he could get them back for her.Mike told her to wait for a few minutes and that he would call her back. Right there on the golf course, he pulled up Reload Mobile on his BlackBerry, found the Reload backup containing her emails and made it available to her. She was elated to find her email and Mike was very pleased that he didn’t have to forfeit his game.