K-12 Cooperative Chooses Roaring Penguin's CanIt-PRO to Relieve School Districts of E-Mail Spam and Viruses

Business Wire, May 4, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

OTTAWA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 4, 2004

Erie 1 BOCES/WNYRIC now offers flexible protection from

e-mail spam and e-mail borne viruses to school districts

in seven counties in Western New York

Erie 1 BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services)/Western New York Regional Information Center (WNYRIC) has deployed Roaring Penguin Software's CanIt-PRO anti-spam solution as a new service to more than 100 school districts within its region. Erie 1 BOCES/WNYRIC now offers CanIt-PRO as a service to protect school districts' users and computers from the burden of junk e-mail and the threat of e-mail borne viruses.

Bill Brown, Messaging/Filtering Services micro-computer support technician, said, "We researched various options to provide our region's school districts with protection from e-mail spam and viruses, and CanIt-PRO was simply the best available. It provides all the features we need, and much more. Most importantly, CanIt-PRO enables the per-user flexibility that we need to ensure each district, each school building and even each user has the level of mail filtering that suits them. There was simply nothing else out there with the flexibility and functionality of CanIt-PRO."

Twenty-one of the region's schools have signed up for the service, with more planning to make it part of their budgets next school year. CanIt-PRO enables individual districts, schools and end-users to choose whether their e-mail is filtered, and how. Through Erie 1 BOCES/WNYRIC's CanIt-PRO web enrollment portal, e-mail users may opt in or out of mail filtering, or choose a particular level of filtering that best suits their needs.

Administrators can also configure the solution to filter e-mail for malicious attachments, such as viruses, prior to reaching end-users' inboxes and critical school networks. Schools and districts also may choose to provide more advanced users with access to an advanced interface that allows them to manage their own Spam Traps, whitelists and blacklists.

CanIt offers the industry's most complete and flexible anti-spam and anti-virus solution. It can be deployed in any enterprise e-mail environment, including on all Linux and UNIX servers. As a stand-alone gateway appliance, it can protect e-mail environments running non-UNIX servers, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise.

CanIt is available in standard and professional versions as either a software download or on a plug-and-play appliance. CanIt-PRO is ideal for very large enterprises, ISPs, web hosts and campus environments, where control and management of the system needs to be distributed to individual departments or users. A trial version of CanIt can be obtained at www.canit.ca/evaluation.php.> About Roaring Penguin

Founded in 1999, Roaring Penguin Software Inc., specializes in e-mail filtering. Since 2000, the company has focused on fighting spam at the mail server, with the acclaimed MIMEDefang and CanIt product lines. Today, Roaring Penguin develops, deploys and supports its spam- and virus-fighting products for customers that include campuses, ISPs, web hosts, government offices and enterprises. For more information visit www.roaringpenguin.com.

About Erie 1 BOCES and the WNYRIC

Erie 1 BOCES is one of 38 educational service agencies established by the State Legislature in 1948 to provide quality, cost-effective services to New York State school districts. Erie 1 BOCES serves approximately 82,000 students in 20 component school districts surrounding the city of Buffalo.

The mission of Erie 1 BOCES is to sustain and enhance the capacity of component school districts to carry out their roles as the chief instrument in the schooling of the children, youth and adults in their communities. For more information, visit www.e1b.org.

The WNYRIC/Information Technology division of Erie 1 BOCES houses one of 12 Regional Information Centers statewide. Approximately 274,000 students are served by the WNYRIC across five BOCES and their component districts, providing an electronic network that links schools and BOCES across the region and state. For more information, visit www.wnyric.org.