January 2011

In January 2011 I surveyed IT Directors in FE and HE on their approach to email filtering (scanning for spam, viruses etc) and archiving. The results of this survey will feed into a discussion at our IT Committee (IT governance body) later today. 33 responses were received, mostly in the first couple of days. 31 of these were from Higher Education institutions - so this is effectively a survey of mail filtering and archiving in HE only. Read on for an analysis of the responses, qualitative feedback from the respondents, and my conclusions.

At Loughborough our current approach is to use Google's built-in filtering for students and alumni, coupled with in-house filtering on our mail routers with SpamAssassin and ClamAV - and Forefront on our Exchange servers for staff. We also operate a locally developed archiving solution for staff which grew out of a JISC project on records management (see our EDUCAUSE 2007 talk on email archiving by Garry Booth, Graeme Fowler and Carys Thomas) and Kochi, an innovative solution to the problem of targetted "spear phishing" for users' passwords (see Graeme Fowler and Mike Cardwell's Kochi presentation to the UK Network Operators Forum).

Last summer I blogged about amplified events and using this blog for engagement, which is a topic I returned to for the recent Web 2.0 guidelines crowdsourcing experiment.  I've not had an opportunity until lately to try putting together an amplified event, but this has now presented itself in the form of the first Google Apps for Education UK User Group meeting.  We're hosting this at Loughborough's Holywell Park Conference Centre next month, back to back with the UCISA Cloud Computing Seminar.

Holywell Park Conference Centre at Loughborough