The polls have closed! Here are your—and our—favorite products of the year
Windows IT Pro's annual Editors' Best and Community Choice award programs offer a unique way to recognize the hottest products among the past year's offerings. Choosing favorites from such a competitive field—not to mention in the midst of such a financially unstable market—can be a challenge, but this year's winners show an uncommon breadth of functionality and originality.
Our Editors' Best program highlights products that Windows IT Pro editors and contributors believe are worthy of recognition, whereas our Community Choice program lets our readers decide which products are the best. As we did last year—rather than presenting a predefined list of products and services that limited your selection to our choices—we opened up the Community Choice nomination process to all. We let you nominate your favorite products and services, built the voting survey from there, and let everyone participate in the final voting phase. For the Gold winners of both Editors' Best and Community Choice, we even reached out to readers and spoke to them about how the product or service helps them do their job. We spoke to real users about real experiences, and we hope these testimonials benefit you in your environment.
In these pages, you'll find our Gold, Silver, and Bronze Editors' Best winners in each category directly adjacent to our Community Choice winners. Sometimes our editors and readers have agreed on favorite products and services in a given category, but more often they haven't. Do you agree with the choices our editors have made? Or do the picks that our readers have made carry more weight? Let us know! Regardless of whether these winners were chosen by editors or readers, you can be sure that all these products are worthy of serious consideration if you're in the market for a new tool.
Best Active Directory and Group Policy Product
Editors' Best
Gold: Active Administrator • ScriptLogic • www.scriptlogic.com
Silver: Ensim Unify Active Directory Manager • Ensim• www.ensim.com
Bronze: Active Directory Change Reporter • NetWrix • www.netwrix.com
Why It Won: Active Administrator consistently gets rave reviews from administrators in the trenches who appreciate how it simplifies managing the complex beast that is Active Directory (AD).
Simplifying management of a multi-domain AD environment and improving AD security is key for John Daniely, security analyst at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Before we implemented Active Administrator, it was very difficult and time-consuming to determine what changes were made in either domain—and by whom—when things weren't working as expected. With Active Administrator, we're able to easily report on any changes made to AD on either domain within minutes. We've even set up scheduled daily reports that are emailed and stored to a secure network location, detailing user and group changes, password resets, lockouts, and changes to GPOs that can be reviewed for suspicious or unauthorized activity." With Active Administrator, Daniely says, AD administrators can also streamline new user creation and delegate appropriate rights. And when users report access problems with company systems, Active Administrator's AD object restore capability comes to the rescue.
Community Choice
Gold: Active Directory Change Reporter • NetWrix • www.netwrix.com
Silver: NetIQ Directory and Resource Administrator • NetIQ • www.netiq.com
Bronze: Active Administrator • ScriptLogic • www.scriptlogic.com
"Start with the great freeware version, but know that you'll soon be upgrading to the rich toolset of Active Directory Change Reporter's commercial version."
Other hot vote-getters in this year's survey . . .
- Centrify's DirectControl
- ScriptLogic's Desktop Authority
- Quest Software's ActiveRoles Server
Best Antivirus and Anti-Malware Product
Editors' Best
Gold: Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Workstations • Kaspersky Lab • www.kaspersky.com
Silver: BitDefender Antivirus Pro 2011 • BitDefender • www.bitdefender.com
Bronze: ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 • ESET • www.eset.com
Why It Won: Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Workstations provides centralized protection of workstations on a corporate network from malware, potentially dangerous programs, network attacks, and unwanted mail.
Mike Kavka is a network engineer who uses Kaspersky's enterprise antivirus suite. According to Mike, Kaspersky's protection is "superior to Symantec, Trend, and McAfee. Overall, it uses fewer resources most of the time." In addition, he notes that "updates to Kaspersky's database happen more frequently than most products (sometimes multiple times a day)." Although Mike did note some downsides to the product, he says that "once tweaked, Kaspersky is an excellent security suite, and the clients I have set it up for have had a huge drop in malware infections."
Community Choice
Gold: Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 • Symantec • www.symantec.com
Silver: Endpoint Security and Data Protection • Sophos • www.sophos.com
Bronze: AVG Internet Security • AVG • www.avg.com
"Symantec's Endpoint Protection has become stronger and faster throughout its evolution."
Other hot vote-getters in this year's survey . . .
- Malwarebytes's Anti-Malware
- Kaspersky's Anti-Virus for Windows Workstations
- Sunbelt Software's VIPRE Enterprise
Best Auditing and Compliance Product
Editors' Best
Gold: Blackbird Management Suite • Blackbird Group • www.blackbird-group.com
Silver: ChangeAuditor for Active Directory • Quest Software • www.quest.com
Bronze: ELM Enterprise Manager •TNT Software • www.tntsoftware.com
Why It Won: The Blackbird Management Suite provides comprehensive auditing for AD and the Windows file system with real-time alerting.
"The Blackbird Management Suite provides best-of-breed auditing for AD and the Windows file system," said Michael Otey, technical director for Windows IT Pro. "For AD, the Blackbird Management Suite provides auditing, protection from unwanted changes, and change management with workflow. For the Windows file system, it enables the administrator to track who, what, where, when for all file-system changes. Real-time alerts can notify the administrator about changes to any critical components. It's a great product."
Community Choice
Gold: NetWrix Change Reporter Suite • NetWrix • www.netwrix.com
Gold: Enterprise Vault • Symantec • www.symantec.com
Bronze: NetIQ Secure Configuration Manager • NetIQ • www.netiq.com
"I love NetWrix's modular design!"
Other hot vote-getters in this year's survey . . .
- Centrify's DirectAudit
- Idera's SQL compliance manager
- GFI's EventsManager
