“Beginfinite is a company uniquely focused on eSecurity software for Novell GroupWise, notes Charles Taite, Chief Technology Officer for Beginfinite. “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 of the value of working with DeveloperNet and Novell's YES Testing program to develop high-quality solutions for Novell platforms."

Carilion Health System’s Novell GroupWise installation spans 24 post offices and 5400 users, including doctors, nurses, employees, students, and faculty. “We process as many as 36,000 messages on a daily basis,” notes Scott Moore, Senior E-Mail Administrator for Carilion Health System. “As administrators, we deal with the back-end problems. One of the ways we measure our performance is through the value we bring to those we serve, and maximizing the return on Carilion’s investments in technology.”

Continues Moore, “Two years ago we had 27 GroupWise domains, which made the system slow and unreliable at times. Since then we’ve worked to clean up and enhance the GroupWise system, and now we’re down to managing just 16 domains. We started by moving GroupWise off of older servers and adding new servers that run GroupWise exclusively, and running GroupWise MTAs from POAs on separate servers. Also during this time, the increasing frequency of attacks and security holes in common products with a strong focus on Microsoft offerings greatly increased our awareness of overall e-mail security. And it definitely put GWAVA on our radar screen as a possible solution.”

“At first, we ran GWAVA configured simply as an AV solution,” notes Moore. “Then we added extension blocking, content filters and address/domain blocking. We just added Anti-Spam Heuristics to get finer grained control of what constitutes spam to our organization. Even though we still have a higher threshhold than I would like, it’s much better than it was! We set a threshhold of points that indicates spam. If we block a preset number of legitimate emails, we can decrement it until we hit a comfort level. We notify our users of viruses. However, we don’t notify users of blocked messages because we don’t want to alarm them or impact their busy schedules.”

“We evaluated several solutions for GroupWise,” says Moore. “But we chose GWAVA because of everything the product offered, including the ability to stop spam, block prohibited content, and especially because it is so effective in decrypting internal and external GroupWise messages for virus scanning. GWAVA running on GroupWise is indispensable in combating Microsoft-targeted viruses and spam e-mail.”

“GWAVA is also well supported by Beginfinite," continues Moore. "In the deployment phase, our GroupWise MTAs kept locking up and were not processing mail. After working with Charles Taite, we ended up turning off SMP on NetWare 5.1, then Charles worked with Novell to examine and replace an NLM with an updated version that addressed SMP operability on GroupWise. I’ve been building a relationship with Beginfinite since 2002, and they’ve been great to work with. We have to sell each blocking extension to our internal review board. Along with their technical support, Beginfinite staff has been instrumental in helping me understand how to implement and use GWAVA’s many features, and justify the expenditure to add new features to the product.”

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