FaceTime's Enterprise Edition Product Suite aims to provide comprehensive management and control of instant messaging and P2P communications.
FaceTime is so confident in its product that in addition to the normal email and telephone support services, it provides support via an instant messaging link. Support is not available at weekends, though, which might be a problem.
Set up of the 1U rack-mountable device is simple, but the range of configuration options means that system installation does require some planning.
The suite consists of the IMAuditor at the heart of the system, managing users and policies, the Real-Time Guardian, managing perimeter security and controlling and blocking any unauthorized IM connections, and the Real-Time Controller, providing centralized control, management and monitoring of the other systems and applying global policies.
All devices can be managed using web browsers, and all are protected by user name and password combinations. The complete system offers control down to individual service and user level. Apart from several IM services, the system can also control and monitor access to the Reuters system.
The system provides comprehensive logging and reporting options, including network usage by type of service and volume of traffic. Content filtering word lists can be defined and used for both reviewing conversation transcripts and blocking incoming and outgoing messages. There are extensive search facilities available so that a particular conversation can be found by date or user or by a specific text string.
The system maintains a database of all users in the system. This can be created manually and can also import data from LDAP servers such as Active Directory, Sun ONE or Lotus Domino.
Users can be assigned to groups, and receive the privileges and restrictions assigned to it, allowing control over features such as file transfer and inter-group messaging, and also the archiving and auditing of conversations.
