FaceTime IM Auditor

If you’re looking for a way to manage your instant messaging infrastructure, check out FaceTime’s IM Auditor.

The initial installation was easy. FaceTime has further streamlined the process by offering its IM Guardian in a fully integrated network appliance (the RTG500) running hardened Linux. All you do is turn it on, give it an IP address and away it goes, monitoring your IM traffic.

FaceTime’s user interface was exceptionally elegant and easy to use. We also discovered a lot of smaller products or options that add to the IM monitoring and management big picture. FaceTime offers IM Guardian for monitoring at the edge, and IM Auditor is its policy engine.

FaceTime’s IM Auditor is even more detailed. Not only can there be global reviewers, but FaceTime introduces the concept of a group supervisor.

This distinction gives reviewer privileges that are limited in scope, rather than function, to a defined group. For example, you might have separate reviewers for each of the sales, marketing and engineering groups who only can see conversations for each department’s users, and another global reviewer, who has access to everything.

IM Auditor also can give end users the ability to search over their own conversations. While IM Auditor doesn’t store separate keywords from the blocked list, it does provide the ability to search for ad hoc text.

With IM Auditor, a set of global permissions is applied by default until an administrator creates groups to customize the permissions. File transfer permissions are yes/no, and can be applied to each group differently.

One interesting addition in IM Auditor is a policy for whether the IM clients can use the built-in audio and video features, or play the built-in games. Another interesting feature is that FaceTime separates content-filtering functions from system-administration functions and makes them part of the global reviewer’s functions.

A global reviewer can create words and phrases to watch for, and specify a group or groups to which a new rule is applied. The policy can include whether a message should be blocked inbound and/or outbound, and whether someone should be alerted by e-mail when an infraction occurs.

For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/0628imrev.html