Archiving Google Apps for Education Email?

One of the biggest things I'd like to change for our school district is our email system. We're currently using Novell Groupwise--which isn't a bad system overall, it's just clunky and not so user-friendly and is WAY overloaded with features that we'll never use. I'm a Google guy...I've used many different webmail clients, and, out of all of them, Gmail is by far the best--especially when integrated with Google Calendar and Google Docs. Schools can get Google Apps for Education, which includes email, calendar, and docs for free. FREE is very appealing for school districts. So why have we not implemented this yet? Well...it boils down to a little problem called email archiving. We're required by law to archive emails for use as forensic evidence. Google offers a service called Postini to archive Google mail (which used to be on its own, but I believe Google bought them out) but costs a LOT of money...money that we do not have.
We implement a system called Total Traffic Control from Lightspeed Systems, which includes email archiving as part of the package. The trouble I'm having is how to get Google Apps email to talk to Lightspeed Systems email archiver. I have talked to Lightspeed Systems support several times to ask whether I would even be able to accomplish this, and the response I got was: in theory, yes, but no one has done it yet that they know of. A quick google brought up this blogpost from a guy who was looking into it. Hopefully he'll give me some hints, or at least let me know whether he ever got it up and running.
I think I have several pieces of the puzzle, but just haven't had time to actually sit down and look at implementing it. Here is one piece of the puzzle from Google's help to configure email routing--the Lightspeed support guy said that one way to implement this may be setting up a mail server of our own, and archiving off that. The Lightspeed system we're running doesn't have a mail server built-in as far as I know, so this may be the way we have to go. I'll probably try setting up a small Linux box for that, and setting up email archiving in Lightspeed for that should be fairly easy.
I'll be sure to post updates as I go along...we're a little busy with moving teachers around right now so this project may take quite a while...in addition to all the other projects I have as well.

Comments

  1. DanJuly 22, 2010 at 6:26 PM

    Hey,

    Thanks for this Post, I am currently reviewing and looking into the same process with Lightspeed TTC,

    Keep us informed of your progress on this - In theory it does seem to be fine and doable with LS but will require a little tinkering to get working,

    Regards,

    ReplyDelete
  2. mpaulsJuly 23, 2010 at 6:28 AM

    Glad to know that there are more people out there wanting to do the same thing :) I'll work on a blog post outlining what the person I contacted said should work.

    ReplyDelete

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