Tyler Independent Schools District
The largest school district in Northeast Texas, Tyler Independent Schools District (TISD) maintains a total of 35 campus and auxiliary facilities, and serves an enrolment of approximately 18,000 students. As a district of this considerable size, TISD maintains a large amount of important records, on not only current enrolments but also historical data.
TISD was advised by their legal counsel that they needed an efficient archiving system for compliance with the Public Information Act, a law guaranteeing citizens access to public records kept by government agencies. As email is a public record, just like any other document, TISD needed a system in place to control the increasing amount of email data. In addition to the ability to respond quickly to compliance requests, TISD needed an effective means to identify possible employee violation of district policy or unprofessional conduct toward students, parents or fellow employees.
In response to this compelling requirement, the Tyler IT team researched prospective solutions listed in the Archiving Technology Partner page of the Microsoft website and identified C2C as the only company to offer the complete solution for their requirements.
C2C guided the team to a total hardware and software solution based on the latest technologies for active, long-term archiving of critical data. The proposed solution was based on C2C’s Archive One Compliance product set, coupled with storage vendor PowerFile’s network-attached Active Archive Appliance. A comprehensive proposal was put forth by Messaging Solutions, a Texas-based email specialist recommended to TISD by other Texas school districts.
From the initial meeting with C2C, the whole solution was selected and implemented within two weeks. The installation and commissioning took place in a single day. John Orbaugh, Director of Technology Services at TISD said, “I was truly impressed at the timescale in which this solution was implemented; the workload on us was minimal”. The solution is now fully operational for 2,500 mailboxes throughout the entire school district.
The entire end-to-end solution is designed for safe storage and easy retrieval. The Archive One software extracts a copy of every message sent through the Tyler email system and writes it to the cache server, not deleting any message from the email server until receiving notification that the message is safely stored.
As the email is stored, it is indexed, within the application, and a structured permissions based management system allows privileged administrators to search the mail archive quickly when they receive requests for message retrieval. The stored data also has an extra layer of protection as the email records are tamper-proof. The software manages the retention of the email for a defined number of years. The lifespan is initially set for permanent retention, but the setting can be easily changed so that Tyler can delete mail data when allowed by law.
“We are now compliant with the Public Information Act,” remarked John Orbaugh. “The new archiving solution has placed our district in a favorable position, where we are protected from a potential accusation of not providing all information requested by a citizen. We can also show that our email records are in a tamper-proof storage system and that we can easily search and retrieve emails using the extensive search tools within the application. Our district has a product that can grow as our storage continues to increase over the years.”
“So far this has been such an easy installation,” added Orbaugh. “In due course we expect to use this new archiving system to solve some of our capacity problems.”