Case Study - Anglicare
Company: AnglicareWA
Location: East Perth, WA, Australia
Contact: Jagdeep Bhabra, IT Co-ordinator
Industry: Not-for-profit Health & Welfare Services
Number of mailboxes: 500
Products in use: GFI MailEssentials™
Quick Read
AnglicareWA is a Community Service organization forming part of the community services sector in Western Australia with a range of services delivered in communities throughout WA, assisting approximately 30,000 people every year. With over 350 people volunteering throughout the year, the organization recognized that dealing with the growing volume of spam was wasting valuable time and resources and they therefore installed GFI MailEssentials, an anti-spam and anti-phishing software in order to successfully combat the problem of spam.
Challenges
AnglicareWA is a separately incorporated community service organization as part of the community services sector in Western Australia assisting over 30,000 people every year. Whilst independent in one sense, it is linked by legal structure, history and tradition to the work of the Anglican Church, expressed through the Dioceses of Perth, Bunbury and North West Australia.
With a large team of over 350 volunteers, apart from regular employees, email is an important means of communication for AnglicareWA. The downside, however, is that the organization started to notice increasing volumes of spam traffic which had an impact on their email servers. This also meant an increase in email borne threats thus placing the IT system under a lot of pressure and more prone to outside viruses. Monitoring users on such a system is a lot more time-consuming and can be more difficult that in regular companies. Therefore it was important that AnglicareWA protected their computer system and attempted to control the amount of spam that hit their email servers. By installing GFI MailEssentials they sought to find a solution to combat the problems that spam can cause.
Implementation
"This was AnglicareWA's first attempt at combating the problem of spam and of conforming to the new legislation concerning organizational compliance standards with MS Exchange 2003. From a management, compliance and legal perspective, the use of the generic email disclaimer that comes with GFI MailEssentials has assisted AnglicareWA from a communication management, compliance and legal perspective. We can now send emails that, without GFI MailEssentials disclaimer being activated, we could not send", said Jagdeep Bhabra, IT coordinator for the organization.
"From a technological perspective, the use of GFI MailEssentials anti-spam has drastically reduced the level of spam that used to come into our inboxes and the redirection into our junk email folders has assisted a lot of staff in saving time that was otherwise spent cleaning their inboxes daily. This increases productivity which leads to greater benefits for the company."
Mr. Bhabra also commented upon the financial benefits that AnglicareWA reaped by installing the GFI product. "The time saving that was acquired from spam being filtered automatically into our staffs' junk email folders, has increased productivity to a new level, hence being a financial benefit. In terms of being competitively priced, GFI gave us savings of nearly 40%."
"GFI MailEssentials installation was really easy, as you just have to follow the prompts as you go. Understanding the various components within GFI MailEssentials was a learning curve like any other new software, but we managed to pick up the software usage side of things pretty quickly", commented Mr. Bhabra.
Benefits
With the implementation of GFI MailEssentials, AnglicareWA could rest assured that their email inboxes would no longer be flooded with spam.
Moreover Mr. Bhabra also commented that they chose a GFI product because of its simple installation and subsequent use, and competitive pricing. "The ease of use of the software during and after installation was a bonus. GFI products gave us a simple and effective solution at a very competitive price." In fact AnglicareWA had considered an alternate solution to their problem by trying out Surf Control but did not go ahead with this option for financial reasons. "It was uneconomical to implement this product," replied Mr. Bhabra.
Target Reached
An important and valuable benefit that most GFI products offer are the instant results that can be seen upon installation. "We saw immediate results with the disclaimer, although other components did require a server restart for services to take action," confirmed Mr. Bhabra.
AnglicareWA were satisfied with the results that GFI MailEssentials provided. "The provision of anti-spam and email disclaimer services is definitely the most valuable benefit that GFI offered our organization," said Mr. Bhabra.
The solution offered has been cost effective to AnglicareWA on a year to year basis, as well as saving time in operations efforts. "Yes it has definitely saved time in research and unnecessarily re-coding potentially hazardous VB scripts to achieve the same result," said Mr. Bhabra.
"We are very happy with the current implementation of GFI within our Agency. It provides a good solution without causing any problems to our current technology infrastructure."
Links
For more information about GFI MailEssentials Click Here.
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October 2008