Centerwise Administrator also lets you manage subnet bandwidth. When you select a user or group to manage, the user or group’s properties, including an IP Subnet Filter section, appear on the right side of the UI. You can use the IP Subnet Filter feature to control traffic between your network’s IP subnets. I used this feature to impose bandwidth priorities to my cable modem’s Internet connection without imposing bandwidth priorities to connections between my LAN’s machines. However, when you define subnet filters, the UI is unclear about which IP address you need to enter. The Administrator’s Guide documentation was disappointingly unhelpful on this point.
You can also use Centerwise Administrator to block access to a specified list of Internet sites. However, to block these sites, the feature blocks DNS resolution of their domain names. Therefore, users can still access sites in the local cache and use IP addresses instead of domain names to access blocked sites.
Additional Considerations
Centerwise’s online Help isn’t Microsoft’s standard HTML Help but is HTML-based. Although this Help format isn’t Web-based, context-sensitive, or searchable, the format is fine for most situations. Centerwise Administrator lets you back up and restore the Control Point database. However, Centerwise makes only one backup at a time and saves that backup only to a specific Centerwise folder subdirectory. Each new backup overwrites the previous backup. More sophistication (e.g., letting you specify where to save the backup) would improve this product feature.
The product’s UIs are also slightly clumsy. Some program windows, such as the log window, aren’t resizable. When you select users and groups from Centerwise Administrator’s UI, the properties area’s subsections (e.g., IP Subnet Filters) should also be resizable. As a result, to use the product I needed to scroll a lot. However, Centricity Software redesigned the UI for the product’s second version.
The Virtual Help Desk is Centerwise’s only UI for the clients on which you’ve installed Agents. When Agents detect certain networking errors, Virtual Help Desk’s pop-up messages report the errors to the user. These messages are somewhat helpful: They’re more verbose but not substantially clearer than the messages Windows might give you. Nevertheless, the Virtual Help Desk is a necessary feature; the pop-up messages also notify users about Centerwise events such as attempts to access a blocked site.
You can activate the product’s logging program from the CP icon in the system tray, but the program doesn’t provide much useful information. The log entries are meaningless to the user: They look more like debug statements for Centerwise programmers than logged program events. My Win2K Server machine’s event log showed no Centerwise events, which is a shame: Many program events, such as bandwidth constraints and client attempts to access blocked sites, are worth reporting.
The product has "version 1" written all over it. The holes in its administration capabilities are frustrating. The Help and documentation gaps make configuration a longer process than necessary. Program developers didn’t plan some features, such as logging and backup, well. Nevertheless, Centerwise’s primary functionality—bandwidth management at the user and application level—is undeniably useful, and the statistical graphs give compelling evidence that this functionality works. At $5000 for a 100-user license, the product isn’t a solution that many companies can casually try. However, the enhancements to the product’s second version make it a more justifiable purchase.
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