14 DAY TRIAL // Symantec Corp. announced that Monte Cassino School uses Symantec Hosted Mail Security to help provide a safe and secure online environment for the school's students, teachers, and parents. With the combined protection of Symantec AntiVirus and Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam, Symantec Hosted Mail Security makes e-mail and other online activities safe for use in connecting students, teachers, and parents for a rich and collaborative educational environment.
Monte Cassino School, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has been owned and operated by the Benedictine Sisters since 1926. The school instructs more than 1,000 students ranging from preschool through grade eight. To provide students with the highest quality education, Monte Cassino School relies on e-mail to facilitate communication across a community of 3,000 administrators, faculty, students, parents, and alumni.
Creating a Safe Working Environment for Students
As part of the school's mission to benefit from the wisdom of parent communication, e-mail has become the primary means for communication between teachers and parents. Parents can use e-mail to stay involved in their child's education by keeping informed about school announcements, scheduling changes, student progress, and behavioral concerns. To facilitate communication, e-mail addresses for the school's 130 teachers are widely circulated and frequently posted on the Internet, making the addresses targets for spammers. On average, the school receives 1,000 inbound e-mail messages per week, 40 percent of which are unwanted spam e-mails.
"Like all educational institutions, we know that spam is more than just an annoyance-it is a critical concern," says Nancy Stustman, director of technology at Monte Cassino School. "We expect the highest standards of our teachers and students and we can't risk allowing unsolicited and inappropriate content to slip through our defenses. Symantec's Brightmail AntiSpam technology has saved our teachers and administrators the burden of regularly opening and deleting at least 25 to 30 unsolicited messages a day. It continues to block offensive content from reaching the inboxes of our students and staff." "E-mail technology is more than a preferred method of communication at Monte Cassino, it's a vital component of each student's academic success," Stutsman says. "Due to the ability of Symantec Hosted Mail Security to keep us free from vulnerabilities, we have been virus-free for two years and running. Symantec has also been able to stop 95 percent of all spam, including no false positives."
Maximizing IT Resources to Improve Education
Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite makes it possible to configure new teacher PCs and restore failed hard drives. What at one time took more than two hours, provisioning a new PC now takes 15 minutes and IT administrators can provision several PCs all at once.
Without the administrative burden of managing e-mail security, Monte Cassino's IT team can devote more time to training teachers on technology resources that are dedicated to improving the quality of each student's education. The school recently began managing parental approvals electronically, eliminating the need to obtain the appropriate signatures, which were once transferred from student to parent through a hand-written report.