Education Department in Nyköping, Sweden
The education world is now at the stage where few schools and student/teacher bodies are not on-line. But once a connection with the net is made, managing email traffic becomes a considerable task, which can mean life or death for a schools use of this new communications medium.
In the center of Sweden, south of Stockholm and between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic, lies the county of Sörmland. Its major town is the historic Nyköping which dates back to 12th century and is one of the region’s key educational centers. Their education department covers 22 primary schools, four junior highs schools and two high schools. That’s a total of 6,900 pupils, supported by almost 600 teachers. Between them they are using over one thousand PCs as well as terminal servers in some schools.
This is a huge email community, as Kennert Karlsson, ICT co-ordinator explains. "Every student in our schools get a personal email in grade four. They keep their email account until they are 20 years old. In addition, every employee has a personal email account. And some schools use email lists and forums for employee information. We also have a news server for internal discussions among teachers and students.
With email traffic heading towards 1,500 accesses per day, Nyköping education department realized it was time to reevaluate their email system. They had been using Netscape 1.1 but with the impending Year 2000 changeover and an increasing need for home as well as school access, they felt the need to upgrade.
Kennert Karlsson evaluated various systems including Microsoft Exchange and Netscape but settled on IMail Server from Ipswitch. "We chose to use Ipswitch software because their products have a good reputation," he says. "WS_FTP is the FTP program I always go back to when others fail." IMail won out to Exchange on various counts, not least due to its pioneering web interface system. According to Karlsson, "The web interface is much better in IMail. Our schools don’t have the computing power to handle Exchange through a web interface. And IMail has an interface which is very easy to translate into Swedish. With IMail it’s also much easier to manage both licensing and actual email accounts." IMail also won out on price. "Its cost is one tenth that of Microsoft Exchange or Netscape," he says.
One copy of IMail Server was implemented in June of 1999 and is now accessed daily by a user base of 6,500. This is expected to grow to at least 7,500 by the end of 2000.
It was a particularly easy implementation, with no need to install client software on students’ computers and no repercussions from the schools using terminal servers. Karlsson reports that "It’s much easier to handle all our accounts through the ‘adduser’ system and a database. ‘Webmessaging’ - which we translated into Swedish - is used as the primary interface for students. As a result students can now read their mail from any computer in school or at home."
In conclusion, Kennert Karlsson is well placed to state, "There is no doubt that IMail is the best email server for education. After all, we don’t want email users to be NT users."
