Websense Enterprise

Once again the old saw holds true: You get what you pay for. Websense Enterprise costs a bit more than the other filtering products, but the extra cost is justified by its inclusion of every filtering capability you could ask for, all wrapped up in a management interface that's eminently flexible and usable. We consider its best-of-breed remote and centralized management capabilities highly desirable for enterprise customers. It also offers the most soft-blocking features, giving you a way to win over your workforce rather than just clamping down on them.
Other products we tested are worthy of honorable mention. Top on this list is SurfControl. We like its intuitive interface, ability to create combination categories and user groups, flexible policies, and powerful monitoring and reporting tools. It fell behind Websense in our testing only
by letting us occasionally sneak peeks of blocked content. Second, Sentian's interface beats that of any of the other products, and it aced our site-blocking tests.

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Websense Enterprise is a mature and flexible solution that addresses the most important issues in Web filtering and beyond. For companies that want fine control over employees' Web access, no other product equals it. Websense Enterprise has more protocols, categories, and soft-blocking choices than its competitors, and its higher cost is more than offset by its higher quality.
Its support for a vast set of firewalls, proxies, and caching products is further evidence of its maturity. Websense Enterprise integrates with these products if they're already at the periphery of your network, or it can work in standalone mode. While configuration was a bit more complex than with the appliances, we had no trouble setting it up.

The Windows-based management interface makes good use of color, keeps a multitude of information well organized, and gives you more options than other products.
Although we like the convenience of Web-based interfaces, Windows -based management interfaces are slicker. Administrators can work remotely over a single TCP port, set policies once, and distribute them to multiple filters throughout a widespread organization. Most companies will
opt for Websense Enterprise's integration with Windows domains and directories to set policies based on existing network users and groups , but there's no delegated administration.
Websense Enterprise's flexibility is most apparent when you're configuring filtering policies. A set of 88 categories makes important distinctions between sex education and sex, between prescribed medications and abused drugs. In addition to blocking, it can limit usage by a time quota or display a couple of soft-blocking variants suggesting that the user surf these sites after work hours. Administrators can also block by file type and keywords.
Companies can opt to use WebCatcher, a tool that captures unknown URLs and sends them to Websense for analysis.
In addition to using categories, administrators can block protocols for such applications as instant messaging, streaming media, and newsgroups. We tried this successfully with AOL and Yahoo!. Websense updates these protocols daily, just as it does category block lists. This became critical for us, as Yahoo! changed a number of log-on servers during our testing. The database update addressed the new servers and blocked traffic flawlessly. The optional bandwidth optimizer lets administrators set usage policies for network hogs like streaming media and Internet radio.
Websense offers three complementary tools to detect, monitor, and report on traffic. The Real-Time Analyzer monitors recent traffic, with flexible views into the data. This lets you see what's going on in the network before configuring policies. Websense Reporter, a powerful Windows-based tool, has more precision and flexibility than we found in other products we reviewed. Administrators can see any slice of information and schedule reports to be sent via e-mail. Risk Reports-particularly helpful-show any bad stuff happening at a glance.
Websense Explorer, a Web-based tool, lets nontechnical users drill down into questionable activity.
Optional categories, called Premium Groups (for ensuring productivity and eliminating high-bandwidth sites as well as those that pose security threats) will bump the price up higher per group. The optional Client Application Manager protects and controls client machines using your network and the Internet.
As our Editors' Choice, Websense Enterprise is all about options-for categories, blocking, and protocols-presented to the administrator in a highly effective way.

Everything is possible with Websense Enterprise: Administrators can dial in flexible policies with categories, protocols, and many soft-blocking options.