Favorite Security Product
- As ex-IS administrators and consultants, the Lab Guys have learned to function on very little sleep. One product that robbed us of what little sleep we get was AbirNet's SessionWall-3. SessionWall-3 is a combination network monitor and firewall that reassembles email, Web pages, and other forms of TCP/IP traffic so that you can see what users are doing and block traffic based on content. At first, this technology scared us, but then we realized all the problems this product could solve. Now we stay up late at night coming up with new applications for SessionWall-3.
Reviewed in Lab Reports, October 1997, page 85
Contact: AbirNet · 817-251-7000 or 800-245-1688
Web: http://www.abirnet.com
Price: Starts at $995
Favorite Test Product
- We live to test products in the Lab, and running benchmarks is a maze we wake up and face every day. Any product that gives us dependable, reproducible, analytical results about server and NT software performance is a winner in our books. That's why Bluecurve's Dynameasure Enterprise 1.5 is our favorite test tool. Dynameasure gives us solid information on database and file sharing performance and lets us stress test all kinds of servers and server software. Dynameasure is at the heart of our NT scalability tests, our NT versus NetWare tests, and our forthcoming database tests.
Reviewed in Lab Reports, September 1997, page 81
Contact: Bluecurve · 510-267-1500
Web: http://www.bluecurve.com
Price: $29,995
Favorite Administration Utility
- Face it: If you hose the NT Registry, you hose your system. Oh, sure, you can always use your Emergency Repair Disk to restore your Registry to a previous state that you don't recall. But often, that restoration is as painful as reinstalling NT from scratch. That's why we were thrilled when we encountered Artisoft's ConfigSafe. ConfigSafe lets you take a snapshot of your Registry (and other critical files and directories). If (or in our case, when) you run into trouble, you can tell ConfigSafe to restore the Registry to the state of the last snapshot. This product offers simple, painless protection.
Reviewed in Lab Reports, October 1997, page 124
Contact: Artisoft · 800-846-9726
Web: http://www.artisoft.com
Price: $39.95
Favorite Microsoft Product
- One test of a favorite product is whether you still like it no matter how many times it blows up or how often it totally frustrates you. That was clearly the case with Microsoft's BackOffice Small Business Server (SBS). Despite the trouble we had with the beta and release candidates of SBS (and we had plenty), we still think SBS is one of the most significant products to come out of Redmond for a long time. SBS combines the power of NT Server, Exchange, SQL Server, and Proxy Server, with new NT capabilities (e.g., fax serving and modem pooling) to address the needs of small businesses.
Reviewed in Lab Reports, December 1997, page 68
Contact: Microsoft · 800-426-9400
Web: http://www.microsoft.com
Price: Call for pricing
Most Borrowed Product (Hi Tech)
- Another way to measure the appeal of a product is to see how long you can keep your hands on it. After we reviewed Microtest's Compas, we had trouble keeping it in the Lab. All the technical people in the company wanted to borrow it. Compas is a handheld unit that diagnoses cabling and protocol problems in Ethernet networks. Think you have a bad cable run? Plug in Compas and find out. Do you wonder where a cable goes? Plug in Compas and it will blink a hub light to tell you where a cable terminates. The Compas is truly useful--if you can keep your hands on it.
Reviewed in Lab Reports, September 1997, page 98
Contact: Microtest · 602-952-6400 or 800-526-9675
Web: http://www.microtest.com
Price: $2595
Most Borrowed Product (Consumer)
- We rarely get a product in the Lab that attracts the interest of every breathing creature in the company. In 1997, that product was Agfa's ePhoto 307 digital camera. The ePhoto 307 camera is so easy to use and produces such high-quality digital images, we had to implement a waiting list so that people could get a chance to use it. In a Lab that's full of expensive and sophisticated computer hardware and software, the most sought after device is a $299 camera. Smile!
Reviewed in Lab Reports, October 1997, page 121
Contact: Agfa-Gevaert Group · 508-658-5600
Web: http://www.agfahome.com
Price: $299