Barking and Dagenham Education AuthorityImagine running a WAN where you need to regard both inside and outside as unsafe when it comes to configuring firewalls and virus protection. Imagine that many of the sites on your WAN have two separate networks managed by staff with very different needs and skills, and other sites are still running peer-to-peer networks due to limitations of scale and local expertise. Does this sound like a big headache to maintain? Well, that's education and "Education doesn't work in the normal way and never has done!", according to Steve Power, Head of Educational IT Support at Barking and Dagenham Local Education Authority. You might expect that one of Power's biggest headaches would be managing email for every individual, (students and staff), in the ten secondary and fifty primary schools, the special school, adult education college and youth training service - plus a number of other groups in the LEA. However, this is far from the case. In fact, right from when it was first supplied to the secondary schools back in 1998, Gordano's NTMail has been "an incredibly stable and easy to use product that hasn't really needed administering by anybody." So when Power came to choose a mail solution for the Local Education Authority WAN in 1999, NTMail was the obvious answer. Since then, they have upgraded through from version 4 all the way to the current version 7, including GLWebMail and Virus Protection Plan (VPP) and have been "enormously pleased with the performance."  To put that performance in context, let's look at some figures: Barking
and Dagenham LEA hosts approximately sixty mail domains on a single server.
The main domain looks after the LEA itself but there are separate
sub-domains for all the fifty primary schools and sub-sets for sections of
the LEA that wanted a separate sub-domain (such as the Hearing Impairment
Service and the Portage Service). Email is routed to a total of seventy
five different buildings. It was not only NTMail's performance in the
secondary schools that led to Power's choice for the LEA. He explains: "We
did look at other solutions but the ability to have multiple domains on a
single server with unique user names, was the main selling point. For
example, NTMail can allow you to have a jsmith at each of the domains. We
didn't want anyone, adults or schoolchildren, to have to be jsmith3 or
something similarly impersonal."
In the primary sector, mail is accessed principally by using Gordano's browser-based email client, GLWebMail. Within the LEA a mixture of GLWebMail and Outlook is used. The Local Education Authority is of course just part of the local council and so it's important that IT systems integrate. The council makes use of Microsoft Exchange, so any solution used by the LEA must work with this. Steve Power describes the route his email must take. "As a local authority user I also have an Exchange mailbox; my Exchange mail is forwarded out of Exchange into NTMail, where Outlook pulls it back into my Exchange in-box. This may seem tortuous, but nobody notices - and if my machine is turned off, or Outlook is not running, then I can access all my mail via GLWebMail - especially useful when I am away from the authority." According to Power, NTMail is a very simple and straightforward system to administer. Power observes wryly that "It took a while to bind seventy IP addresses to the network card of the Windows NT server, but creating accounts is very uncomplicated." He continues: "We just use the web interface to copy and paste lists of names provided by schools. We have a number of people who are able to administer the system, create accounts, re-set passwords etc. Sometimes that's done at a school level for their domain and sometimes we do that for them - it depends if there is someone in the school who is able and has time to do it." Another Gordano messaging product, GLCommunicator, allows Power to send an email to the administration office of all fifty primary schools without the problems associated with using an address book group. Virus protection is another issue that needs a creative approach in Barking and Dagenham LEA's complex networks. After an earlier problem with the Klez virus, Power installed Gordano's VPP (Virus Protection Plan). All outgoing mail from the authority is directed to the NTMail server and is forwarded on from there after checking. So any suspect mail is returned to the school server, thereby preventing any virus from being sent out from the authority to other people. NTMail is also routing the mail from one school to another, preventing schools from infecting each other. At the moment, the secondary schools (who have their own servers) have responsibility for protecting themselves from viruses carried by their incoming mail, but Power is planning to change that. He hopes to reconfigure the network to act as a gateway for all incoming mail - the opportunity to do this may come about soon, as the LEA moves onto the London Grid for Learning connections. He comments that, "With a typical daily count of 170 and a peak daily count of 3,300 virus warnings from VPP, I can see it's really doing its job and I want to give that kind of protection to all the schools in the LEA." Steve Power is currently overseeing a number of upgrades to his complex structure of networks but NTMail will remain central to the network infrastructure and the way it operates. He explains his choice decisively, "NTMail can process a huge amount of traffic on quite a humble platform, unlike Exchange. We are running it on a P2-450 with 2 Gigabytes of RAM at the moment and it's coping well, despite the amount of virus checking and running WebMail that it's doing simultaneously. The council has Exchange systems and they need a specially-trained person to look after them full-time. Any member of my team can carry out the minimal administration necessary on NTMail, as it's so easy. We have a new secondary school opening in September and I'd like to give all the other secondary schools WebMail access and the benefits of the latest version of NTMail too, at the same time. The only problem there is in persuading them to upgrade from a product that's still working perfectly." That's a nice problem to have! |
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