Ipswitch Collaboration Suite Premium Edition Earns High Marks from Vance-Granville Community College
Company: Vance-Granville Community College
Industry: Higher Education
Business Challenge: Vance-Granville Community College needed a scalable email and calendar solution that provided vital email anti-virus capabilities.
Outcome: With minimum administration, Ipswitch Collaboration Suite Premium Edition allows Vance-Granville Community College to collaborate effectively and efficiently.
The picturesque Vance-Granville Community College (VGCC) main campus features a lake, elegant architecture notable for its brick archways and attractive landscaping, and boasts eight permanent buildings that include a student services complex, civic center and daycare unit. Along with a student lounge and learning resources center, the site located just north of Raleigh, North Carolina provides 36 classrooms, 10 shops and 20 labs in which students may train in 35-plus curriculum programs, as well as extension, economic development, continuing education, and small business classes. There’s no question that VGCC opens many doors to educational opportunity. But now that VGCC has Ipswitch Collaboration Suite (ICS) Premium Edition to manage their web-based e-mail, the students truly have the support they need to succeed.
“We added 3600 accounts across four campus locations in ten minutes,” says Ken Lewis, Vice President of Information Technology. “Everything went perfectly with the initial set up, and after we imported the users we created an instruction page telling them how to work with their email account.”
From its humble beginnings in a renovated hospital building in downtown Henderson, North Carolina, Vance-Granville has become a key player in economic development in the four counties its serves: Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin. Throughout its brief 30-year-plus history, the college has sought to provide better opportunities for citizens to learn and to train for meaningful employment. Today, VGCC ranks 12
th
in enrollment among the 58 colleges in the state system.
One of the keys to VGCC choosing ICS Premium Edition was their relationship with Ipswitch Select Partner Advanced Technical Solutions (ATS). Lewis went to the Scott Depot, WV reseller with his vision for bringing an email solution to the college, and they delivered. “It was a great first impression,” says Lewis. “We wanted to be able to find an affordable solution that would provide students with email and calendar capabilities, and it had to be scalable.” ATS recognized that ICS Premium Edition had modest system requirements that were easily met by the VGCC server. Explains Lewis, “ATS recommended ICS Premium Edition. We reviewed it, made sure it did everything we needed, and worked directly with the Ipswitch technology team. It was an excellent experience.” Gary Sims, CEO and President of ATS agrees. “It was a great experience working with Vance-Granville Community College. ICS Premium Edition proved to be the ideal solution for their needs and we were pleased that the implementation went so smoothly.”
With such a large number of students, faculty and staff using colleges and universities’ email systems, a key differentiator for many schools between Ipswitch Collaboration Suite Premium and the standard edition is the addition of vital anti-virus protection for emails. This helps protect the school from email viruses that could potentially infect the entire population. “We continually update the Blacklist,” says Lewis. “Certain attachments are not allowed. Of course, if we do not properly identify an extension, then it will get through, but I would say we have 99 percent success. The software does exactly what we tell it to do.”
One of VGCC’s Stated Objectives is to employ technology to enhance the effectiveness of teaching at the college and to increase the accessibility of learning opportunities to area residents. Technology, however, is typically only as good as the people supporting and maintaining it. “Our IT Department is just ten people, so we’d planned to give the software administrative role to the Distance Learning (on-line education, video rooms, etc.) specialist,” says Lewis. “He was very hesitant. Honestly, he didn’t like the idea of handling this project at all.” But once VGCC had ICS Premium Edition up and running, Lewis found that it takes one person to handle all the administration, and it’s just 2-3% of their total job.
What is perhaps most significant about VGCC’s installation of ICS Premium Edition is not the mail service, anti-spam, anti-virus or instant messaging capability of the software. “We had budgeted probably three times the amount we paid for ICS,” explains Lewis. “We were able to use the money we saved to begin work on the campus IP telephone project. The conversion to an IP-based system will in turn allow us to save more money and it’s great for disaster recovery.”
Lewis notes that while he couldn’t be more pleased with the scalability, ease of implementation, and minimal support required on the part of his team, he measures success by the sounds of silence: “We’ve had ICS Premium Edition up for two semesters and haven’t had a single student or staff complaint nor a minute of downtime. That’s a great deal any way you look at it.”
