April 2004 — Applications
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Security Software Enriches Troy City Schools Educational Experience by Providing Safe E-Mail
In recent years, e-mail has become a valuable tool in the classroom. It has also become an important tool for teachers and administrators to conduct their daily business. While the benefits of e-mail are obvious, spam has become more of a challenge for both IT staff and users within schools. Spam, by its very nature, can be highly offensive and often includes profane language, inappropriate content and/or pornographic images — all of which need to be blocked from students' inboxes. Further compounding the issue of spam is the potential for offensive or harassing content to be sent between users within a school's network.
To address the requirement of schools to block and monitor all e-mail originating both internally and externally, anti-spam technology has emerged as a vital tool. Troy City Schools (online at www.troy.k12.oh.us), located in Central Miami County, Ohio, recognized several years ago that it needed to protect its e-mail users from possible e-mail threats — especially the 4,500 students in its six elementary schools, one junior high and one high school.
Threat to Security
Within the Troy City Schools, each school's computer network is connected to the one high school. All faculty members in the district, as well as all Troy High School students and those attending the Upper Valley Joint Vocational School, have their own e-mail accounts — for a total of 2,500 users. In addition, elementary and junior high students also receive access to e-mail on an as-needed basis for special projects.
Following the implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 in 1999, the district's IT department recognized that it had to ensure staff and students weren't receiving inappropriate content regardless of the point of origin. As viruses were becoming a major concern and a threat to overall network security, any new technology to be implemented had to be complementary because there was an existing anti-virus solution running on Exchange Server.
Given the serious impact of students receiving offensive content in the form of spam or the growing possibility of students being bullied and harassed online, Troy City Schools quickly determined that any technology solution needed to enable both internal and external monitoring of all e-mail. Furthermore, given the numerous audiences with distinct needs in the school district, the IT team needed the ability to apply different rules for the monitoring of e-mail to various user groups or based on the location (either internal or external) of the message originator.
Combating Spam
In looking for a solution, the IT team realized that most products would either filter the Exchange Server inbox or the Internet, and that few solutions offered the versatility of filtering all e-mail. Troy City Schools identified one solution that met all of its criteria: Nemx's advanced version of Power Tools for Exchange, an anti-spam and anti-virus solution that offers multiple lines of defense to block spam at the server level before it arrives in the user's inbox, independent of where it originated.
Following the implementation of its new anti-spam solution, Troy City Schools was able to establish a multi-tiered approach to filtering spam that is currently blocking about 11,000 messages daily.
