Monroe-Woodbury Central School District at a glance:
K-12 School District
• Location: Harriman, NY
• Solution: GWAVA Retain
• Result: Retain’s easy install and speedy performance allays any fears about archiving becoming as troublesome as GroupWise tape backup.
“Retain is a reliable, plug-and-play solution, which doesn’t require much management at all. It was easy to install and just works.” Hugh R. Cauthers & George Armstrong, Monroe-Woodbury Central School District.
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.
"GWAVA is uniquely focused on eSecurity software for Novell GroupWise," notes Charles Taite, Chief Technology Officer for Beginfinite, makers of GWAVA. "We have 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."
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