Grove Group is a Google Distributor and a leading provider of SaaS solutions for more than 400,000 users worldwide. Based in the UK with offices in the USA
CORE Education is a not-for-profit educational research and development based organisation involved in the support and promotion of the use of new technologies for learning across all education and training sectors.
Challenge
When the new IT manager stepped in at CORE, email services were provided by a single Intel Linux server with a two hard drives in RAID 1. Archiving was provided by copying every mail to a duplicate account on the same server. Backup was provided by copying the mail directories to an external USB drive that was rotated daily.
There had been a number of occasions where mail services were disrupted due to lack of disk space and other server hardware problems. Spam filtering was provided by an external service that filtered the mail prior to delivery to the local server.
With a very small IT team of just two people Core-Ed wanted to remove the worry of maintaining an in-house mail server so more time could be spent supporting staff in more interesting areas of IT research and development. A more robust and scalable system was also wanted that provided proper archiving and more failover.
Solution
After researching a number of options, including a locally or remotely hosted Zimbra it was decided to move email to the Google Apps Education Edition. According to IT Manager Glen Davies from CORE Education, “A number of archiving options where investigated to support this service but Postini was decided on due to its scalability and educational pricing. CORE Education decided to use Postini through Grove Group because of the much better support provided by them.”
Result
Google Apps Education Edition was rolled out for all employees at CORE Education. Additionally, add-on services provided by Postini enhanced security and email archiving. Grove Group provided CORE Education with quick service deployment and ongoing support from dedicated account managers and around the clock support from Grove Group’s Global Network Operations Centre (GNOC). This was echoed by the IT Manager Glen Davies, - “Thanks for your help through the sales and setup process. It was great to work with a company that actually responds to my emails. I am constantly amazed by the number of IT companies that I have to chase up and harass just so I can buy their product! - so it was nice to work with a company that actually treats me like a customer.”
