* The Reviewmeister continues to look at enterprise IM products
IMlogic is a solid instant messaging product. IMlogic does a good job of keeping the picture simple for buyers. Its IM Manage is a one-stop offering for IM monitoring, risk management and policy compliance enforcement.
IMlogic also offers IM Detector at no additional cost to detect and stop stubborn users who try to circumvent your policies.
In terms of setting policies, it has a default rule set that is globally applied. System administrators then can create user groups to which they can apply different settings. The file transfer policy is yes/no but can be applied on a group-by-group basis. Likewise, you can create a different list of words and phrases to block different groups or departments. You also can customize your disclaimer text for each group. For content filtering, lists of words, phrases or URLs can be created to trigger additional actions (alerts to the administrator, for example).
The message can be blocked, although no differentiation is made between inbound and outbound. The system can notify the sender of an infraction and send an e-mail to system administrators or make an entry into the Windows event log. These filtering rules can be applied to specific groups, universally or individually per user.
IMlogic also performs directory import and synchronization. But this is very basic, and limited to generic Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. We found this was every bit as functional as the other vendors’ products. But because the system is more generic, a system administrator has to know enough about the local directory service to answer a few questions, such as port and object classes.
IMlogic’s IM Manager is more detailed with reviewer levels, and provides four basic functions – query the logs, edit annotations to conversations, view an audit trail (essentially a review of the reviewer) and manage keywords. The reviewer in IM Manager can create keywords to watch for, but not block. For example, you might not want to prevent employees from using the phrase “stock split,” but you might want to see how it is being used.
Reports cannot be saved or scheduled. But like everything else in IM Manager, the easy-to-use Web interface lets you run reports from anywhere.
For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/0628imrev.html
