In 2003, spam cost businesses $23 billion in lost productivity, interruption of service, and damaged resources. Postini's Perimeter Manager is an email security service that blocks unwanted spam messages and malicious code before they pass through your enterprise firewall. The service stops threats at the perimeter between the Internet and your enterprise servers by analyzing and filtering all messages before they can reach your email gateway. Perimeter Manager can also filter outbound email messages and implement policy controls so that you can lock down and protect all aspects of the corporate email system. You can filter all outgoing email communications for viruses and other policy violations. The integrated disaster-recovery service takes over when your email server goes offline because of a break in network connectivity or server malfunction or overload. Perimeter Manager will then redirect all incoming email to a secure, architecturally redundant message store at the Postini data centers until you restore connectivity. Pricing ranges from $6 to $30 per user per year, depending on the number of users. Postini offers minimum deal pricing of $2500.
Bob Wooley of Pittsburgh applauds Postini's spam service. He says, "Our company recently changed from an internal spam product to an outsource solution from Postini. Our quarantined legitimate spam has doubled since we began using the Perimeter Manager service. Our management hours have decreased to next to nothing. I would highly recommend this product to others trying to effectively block spam from their internal resources."
IntelliReach's Content Inspector can scan the entire Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store (IS) for messages related to a specific employee, keyword, or subject matter. The software searches for a word or a phrase you specify or searches from a detailed Critical Word List of as many as 200 words and phrases. Robert Thompson of Tallahassee, Florida, nominated Content Inspector as a product that makes his job much easier. He says, "The software lets you keyword-search the entire Exchange IS. Content Inspector will search the Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Deleted Items, Drafts, Journal, Notes, Outbox, Sent Items, Tasks, and subfolders. Within these containers, Content Inspector can search within the message body, subject, attachments, and the To, From, and Cc fields. You can specify a date range and define one of three actions to take on messages that meet the criteria: delete the attachment, delete the message, or forward a copy of the message for review. The product is handy for doing keyword searches on topics for legal purposes, removing viruses or spam across the organization, and just plain snooping around."
Content Inspector can scan thousands of messages per hour, and all actions are invisible to users. The product supports Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 5.5. Contact IntelliReach for pricing information.
Bobby Irvin of Rogers, Arkansas, nominated PROMODAG Reports for Microsoft Exchange Server as a top product. He says, "PROMODAG Reports makes reporting on storage, usage, and all aspects of mailbox management a snap! The product gathers information about users and their habits. This utility makes all kinds of reporting very easy."
PROMODAG Reports can measure the usage of your email messaging system from inside and outside the organization, analyze traffic patterns, and establish the cost of using the system. You can see who your users correspond with, analyze mailbox and folder content, and ensure you're meeting your service level agreement (SLA) with a message delivery time report. The Quick Start Wizard guides you through setup and configuration. You can automatically generate reports and publish them on the Internet. PROMODAG Reports supports all versions of Exchange and is available in three editions: standard, professional, and enterprise. Contact PROMODAG for pricing information.
Scott Moseley of Washington, DC, provides high praise for Identify Software's AppSight Black Box, a software module solution that operates similarly to an airplane black-box flight recorder. Deployed on servers and clients, Black Box records application execution at multiple synchronized levels according to a dynamic, user-defined recording profile. Scott says, "Our company has benefited greatly from the use of Black Box. It records everything an application and OS does, even down to the code level for applications developed in certain development languages. We've saved hundreds of man-hours by having Black Box watch what a failing application is doing, then using that information to solve the problem. After Black Box captures the application activity, it then lets you see everything that happened before, during, and after the application failure, including a video of the user's screen and activity throughout the process. The product also lets us watch Web-based activity, following the activity from the browser back through the server to find out the problem. It used to take a significant amount of time to determine which DLL was out-of-date or which registry entry was missing or corrupt, but now we can find out in a matter of minutes. It's incredible technology!"
You can keep Black Box running or run it selectively when problems occur. The data that Black Box records can be stored in a centralized repository or saved as a highly compressed file. To help you identify the cause of problems, the AppSight Console lets you replay Black Box recordings and drill down through them according to skill set and responsibility.
Scott remembers the day he was introduced to the product and how he was floored by its abilities. He says, "When the representatives came to our site for training I spoke so highly of the product and its features that they joked about making me a spokesperson. I don't have that kind of reaction about technology very often, so I knew it was special. Identify Software representatives also have a Web demo for the product that's really impressive." Contact Identify Software for pricing.
