Two hundred and seventy-eight pages. That's the length of the Identity Finder Enterprise Edition documentation. It is easy to see that this needs to be broken into more manageable parts. Trying to find something is nearly impossible unless you use the PDF documentation's bookmarks. Once this software is installed, admins have an option to begin manually or to use the wizard for configuration. So we opted for the wizard install. This part of the utility was very friendly and included unique personally identifiable information (PII) sources.
I selected the PII types to search for and ran the scan against the server system. This system is a base install Windows 2003 server with nothing else installed. Identity Finder identified a match during the system scan. Curious to see what the match was, I clicked on the link to get more information. Instead of providing more information about the match, Identity Finder closed. I then opened up the documentation, which instructed me to re-launch the application from the start menu program list. This option did absolutely nothing. I tried rebooting the machine and still no luck. Even though it wasn't mentioned in the documentation to this point, I tried to install the console application to see if this would make a difference. This action was blocked by the OS, saying I needed to have a more current copy of the Microsoft installer.
Despite these glitches, the product in theory seems to be a good one. A distributed management console is included that can identify PII on all the systems of a network. Discovered PII can be electronically shredded, encrypted or password protected. It has a complete selection of choices of data from which to choose.
A simple installation describes pretty well the product's install process. However, we were never able to figure out the role of the console and where it should be installed.
Identity Finder support for the first year is included in the purchase price, and subsequent years can be purchased.
The pricing for the Identity Finder is a reasonable $49.95 a seat. This product is at the low end of the price spectrum.
