PROVO, Utah Nov. 10, 2003 — The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) runs the second-largest rail transit system and the fifth-largest bus network in the United States, serving a population of 3.5 million who took more than 328 million trips with WMATA in 2002. And while passengers are on the move throughout the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, so are 4,000 WMATA e-mail users in 120 locations who need remote mail capabilities while traveling or working off-site. WMATA also needed resource management to quickly deliver applications and virus updates without requiring IT staff to travel to multiple sites.

WMATA recently upgraded to Novell GroupWise 6.5 and selected Novell ZENworks for resource management, along with Novell eDirectory and Novell iChain to secure its corporate portal.

"We knew if we made the move to Microsoft Outlook we would be more vulnerable to virus attacks," said Fred Candelaria, supervisor of WAN Engineering at WMATA. "We wanted to leverage our positive experience and our expertise with GroupWise. We need to maintain the high level of corporate security that so far has protected us against attacks."

WMATA used ZENworks to deliver the GroupWise upgrade to 4,000 users, including 87 kiosks running Windows 2000, from a central location in about five hours with a 98 percent success rate. Compared to previous rollouts, there was a 70 percent decrease in helpdesk calls. In addition, the junk-mail features in GroupWise 6.5 help individual users block dozens of junk mail messages a day, and coupled with the anti-spam capabilities of Beginfinite's GWAVA, WMATA has reduced its overall junk mail by nearly 30 percent.

"Novell GroupWise lowers our overall cost of ownership with significant savings from overall licensing, administrative and hardware costs," Candelaria said. "The number of projects, technologies and devices to support is always growing, and yet it's nearly impossible to get new IT staff. If we were using any other e-mail system, we would need several administrators just for care and feeding. With GroupWise, our team has the flexibility to do much more."

Novell Press Contact:
Kevan Barney
Phone: (801) 861-2931
Email: kbarney@novell.com