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Best Enterprise Web Content Filter - 25.Jul.2007 9:23:41 PM

ITGuy85

Posts: 8
Joined: 23.Jul.2007
Status: offline

There appears to be three major webcontent filter engines for ISA 2006. Websense, SurfControl, and bt-webfilter. My requirements are for pretty granular web site category control (porn, gambling, hacking tools, etc.). I'm leaning towards Websense. Are there better solutions? It would be running on an ISA 2006 array. The GFI solution looked pretty limited, so I'm not considering them.

What kind of performance hit will Websense cause for the ISA server?

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RE: Best Enterprise Web Content Filter - 26.Jul.2007 2:13:08 PM

stevenljjohnson

Posts: 11
Joined: 30.Apr.2004
From: Telford UK
Status: offline

Hiya Bob,
For what its worth my two penneth!

I have done quite a bit of work over the years using Surfcontrol Web Filter and I have always found it a very reliable piece of software. The rules engine is easy and intuitive to use, if you follow the logic of "if you can't read the rule and it make logical sense then it probably won't work". You can also hack the installation if you copy the cd contents to a hard drive, you can "Adjust" the minimum requirements in the .ini files and so get it working on a much lesser spec'd machine than they suggest running it on. Which is handy for those customers who just refuse to invest in new hardware. The support from Surfcontrol has always been very good as well here in the UK, with some very astute and competent people on their helpdesk and the one day courses for partners is well worth it. Surfcontrol did use to have some bugs in it where by cached links from google or other search engines couldn't be read and thus access to banned websites was possible, howeve they fixed this some years ago as it was a glaring omission on their part.

I have done some websense work as well and to be fair I put on a level par with surfcontrol. It's a personal preference at the end of the day as to which you choose, but either or will do you ok for a robust piece of content filtering.

Good luck!

(in reply to ITGuy85)

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RE: Best Enterprise Web Content Filter - 31.Jul.2007 2:27:25 AM

Antioch

Posts: 11
Joined: 12.Jul.2005
Status: offline

You're sort of right about the GFI solution looking pretty limited. Version 3 of GFI's WebMonitor had a lot of missing functionality.

However they've just issued the new WebMonitor 4 beta which looks much better. Found this with a list of new features: http://kbase.gfi.com/showarticle.asp?id=KBID003134

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RE: Best Enterprise Web Content Filter - 31.Aug.2007 7:28:58 AM

IanC

Posts: 222
Joined: 11.Jul.2007
From: UK
Status: offline

I have done some evaluation on WebMonitor 4 recently and although it's fine for ISA server Standard Edition, it still suffers from the main limitation of its predecessor. It does not provide consolidated monitoring of ISA Server Arrays.

Ian Currie

(in reply to Antioch)

Post #: 4

RE: Best Enterprise Web Content Filter - 20.Sep.2007 1:51:55 PM

DamonVaughn

Posts: 16
Joined: 30.Apr.2004
Status: offline

We use ISS' Proventia web filter. It supports ISA 2006 EE and has good granular control. Integrates nicely with AD as well. Support has always been great.

(in reply to IanC)

Post #: 5