Monitor Network Uptime and Responsiveness
Woodstone's Servers Alive
Servers Alive from Woodstone is an end-to-end network-monitoring tool that features a flexible alerting engine, smart output capability, and graphical results. The product lets you perform a simple ping, or more complex SNMP checks and Windows performance monitoring. If you can't find the check you need within Woodstone's extensive list of available options, you can always write your own using the company's COM interface.
Sean O'Brien of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, provides high praise for Woodstone's Servers Alive. He says, "Servers Alive is a great product for monitoring uptime and responsiveness. We replaced our NetIQ installation when the previous license/support contract expired. We weren't using the extra features of NetIQ (e.g., updates), and the NetIQ solution requires a client application for every connection, whereas Servers Alive is nonintrusive. The comparison of costs involved was the final factor. A full Enterprise Edition license (5000 connections) is only $239! We have been running Servers Alive for more than 3 years, and we couldn't be happier. I have just submitted a request to upgrade our version 4.0 install with the new version 5.0 and have no doubt that it will continue to impress."
Reader
Sean O'Brien
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Product
Servers Alive
Company
Woodstone
Contact
www.serversalive.com
Manage Your Sensitive Personal Information
Custom Business Applications' My Passwords
My Passwords from Custom Business Applications (CBA) manages your numerous Internet services and their required data elements, such as user names, passwords, PINs, key codes, and credit card numbers. My Passwords is a central repository for tracking these services and their user names (i.e.,IDs), passwords, hints, code words, Web site URLs, and comments. Fully customizable categories let you change field names to suit your needs. The latest version includes personal and credit card information Web page fill-in, a system tray icon that can automatically start with Windows, and the option to close My Passwords to the system tray so that it's always quickly available.
Dean Long of Rockville, Maryland, uses CBA's My Passwords. He says, "A friend recommended My Passwords. The software offers automatic Web login in addition to customizable password generation, categories, and fields. My Passwords also has the ability to use multiple encrypted databases to keep your personal passwords separate from work passwords. I've been using it for about a year and a half now and it's great! This program has built-in reporting so that you can make hard copies of your data to carry with you. Additionally, a recently added feature lets you download in XML format to manipulate your own information. Built using Microsoft .NET technology, the GUI is familiar. The program can cut and paste complex, randomly generated passwords into secure Web pages with the click of a button. You can also add your existing passwords and take advantage of this one click feature." Pricing is $24.95.
Reader
Dean Long
Rockville, Maryland
Product
My Password
Company
Custom Business Applications
Contact
www.cbacorp.com
Gain Back User Productivity By Eliminating Spam
Postini's preEMPT Managed Service
When Derek Schauland of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, first started working for his company, it didn't have a spam filter solution in place. Derek spent months researching products and decided on Postini's email service solution. He says, "I studied Postini and watched the demos, and from what I saw, I knew that this was a service that would benefit email users at my company. I pitched the service and its cost to management with some reservation, but I knew that we would realize almost immediate return on investment in the increase in productivity alone. We implemented Postini in December 2003, and by the end of the first month, gained back a tremendous amount of user productivity. Implementation was simple. Thanks to Postini, I am able to report to management that our domain received 85,000 email messages on Christmas day 2003. Only 106 of those messages got through the filter. The majority of the messages were spam, and without Postini, would have flooded our mail server and caused many hours of downtime and additional planning. This service is vital to our business and has made fighting spam much less of a chore."
Postini's preEMPT technology provides complete email security for enterprises by providing threat prevention (e.g., protection against spam, phishing scams, viruses, and directory harvest attacks) policy compliance. Contact Postini for pricing.
Reader
Derek Schauland, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin
Product
preEMPT Managed Service
Company
Postini
Contact
650-216-3574, www.postini.com
Filter Spam Without the Worry of Deleting Important Messages
SpamBayes' SpamBayes
William Gordon of Burlington, Vermont, has recommended SpamBayes from SpamBayes as a product that he can't do without. He says, "For those who need a client-based antispam solution, you can't beat SpamBayes! This open-source product has saved the day for many of my users. We're still running Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 and, as a result, our options for stopping spam at the server level are limited until we've completed our upgrade to Exchange 2003. Since we started using SpamBayes, I estimate that we've filtered maybe hundreds of thousands of emails. SpamBayes makes very few mistakes in its spam categorization. The particular Bayesian algorithm it uses makes it very flexible. I work for a law firm that sometimes deals with medical cases and varied anatomical references, or one of our attorneys might be working on a case addressing breastfeeding rights. Many spam filters would classify much of this correspondence as spam. SpamBayes has scored these messages well with little or no problem. Additionally, the algorithm can learn what you personally consider to be spam. Anyone looking for a client-based spam solution will view this product as a gift from above."
SpamBayes is free, open-source software. The product is written in the Python programming language.
Reader
William Gordon
Burlington, Vermont
Product
SpamBayes
Company
SpamBayes
Contact
spambayes.sourceforge.net
End of Article
