How we tested the various IM management products.
Each product was installed on an HP ProLiant DL380 G3 server, with two 2.8-GHz Xeon processors, 2G bytes of RAM and a 34G-byte RAID5 disk. Windows 2003 Standard Server was installed to host the application and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition database.
For IM-Age, a second server was required for Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration server. A second HP DL380 was installed with Windows 2000 Server to host ISA Server 2000.
Our tests simulated what most public IM users would be doing with three main public IM clients – MSN, Yahoo and AOL Instant Messenger. To test policy enforcement capabilities, we looked for content management and keyword blocking, as well as file transfer management and control.
We did not test effectiveness of anti-virus features on these systems, because the vendors included in the review (see related story) do not manufacture them.
