Spending A Day Off-Line Learning About On-Line

This week I spent a day in the company of Mimecast, for administrator training of their managed email security platform. We recently migrated to their managed service and, so far, things are going very well. While in London I also managed to pop into Internet World 2009 which also gave me a fine opportunity to get my first experience of the London Underground.

The Mimecast training group was kept deliberately small allowing us all opportunity to gain benefit from the technical trainer who took care of us for the day. It is useful to take time out from the usual workday to really focus on familiarising with a new solution as trying to work through documentation in the office is often a non-starter. The day also gave a welcome break from the seemingly never ending amount of archive ingestion I have been working to provide as part of the service implementation. However, the end is in sight for the archive ingestion, fingers crossed, as I head towards the last straight of my email extraction marathon.

Looking at the handy administrator dashboard in Mimecast I can see we have been protected against just under 40,000 questionable messages in April 2009 alone. The majority of these rejections have been IP found in RBL. I expect this figure to rise even further, and spread out a little more, in May as we have tightened up the various content policies, blocked sender lists, and other features the platform is now offering us. A lot of these pointers were gained from the training experience making it a very worthwhile event. I also got take away a 65 page administrator student guide which should make for some interesting bed time reading.

One of the things I really like about a managed service is these blocked messages never made it to our servers in the first place which has not only offered and additional sense of security but also freed up our Internet connection noticeably. We are needing to actively deal with much less SPAM then ever before. The reduction in SPAM has uncovered the problem of unsolicited electronic mail (like the leaflets that often drop through your front door with little regard for their ultimate landfill destination) which was probably hiding out amongst the SPAM – prior to moving to this platform.

We made great progress on the training day which allowed us a slightly earlier finish. As my train back home was not for several hours I took the opportunity to experience the Tube and head towards Earl’s Court for Internet World 2009.

I have to say I was a little apprehensive of the Tube initially but it was actually a surprisingly pleasant, and simple to understand, experience. I found my way from King’s Cross to Earl’s Court quite easily and then back to Marylebone Station for the train journey home. I am not sure what the experience might be like on a regular basis but as an infrequent traveller to London it was extremely well thought out and the tubes were very regular.

Internet World 2009 was a mixed affair and I was a little unsure of what to make of it. There was a plethora of SEO companies, touching shoulders with name registrars, hosting companies and some useful initiatives – such as the ShawTrust Website Accessibility Accreditation Service. Social Media was at every turn with a veritable mix of companies offering all manner of social media add-ins, plugs ins, and viral campaigns. Freebies were few and far between (for the kids you understand) but as a highlight I did get to have a go on a Microsoft Surface computing device which was fun – it kind of reminded me of those arcade table top machines which used to be popular in launderettes. Next year I am hoping to spend a day at the Show, to give it a fair run, and hopefully make it into InfoSec too if it is held at the same location and date again.