ContentKeeper for Web version 123.25 was released in late June, and all Firsthit customers are now running this latest release. For the sake of completeness, here's an overview of the major new features:
Departmental Policy Setup
The Departmental Policy Setup facility introduces a new method of delegating administrative functions by allowing a designated user from each department to login and manage the filtering policies that apply to that department. In essence, this gives a greater degree of flexibility over local filtering policies and frees admin personnel from this task. Of course, policies can be maintained centrally as and when required.
Custom/Local Categories
Custom Categories are now searched before Local Categories allowing user defined URL categories to take precedence over predefined ContentKeeper Local Categories. This much-requested feature allows, for example, streaming feeds from trusted sources to be passed while those from all other sources are blocked.
VLAN Support
ContentKeeper has been enhanced to support filtering of IEEE 802.1Q VLAN traffic. This allows ContentKeeper to identify web traffic within individual VLANs and apply separate policies based on VLAN membership.
Bridge Logging Facility
The Bridge Logging facility is a new diagnostic facility added to ContentKeeper to help troubleshoot complex network and filtering issues. In essence, it adds the ability to record lower level network information to assist when resolving networking and filtering issues, especially in complex network environments.
Internet Activity Graph
The Internet Activity Graph is a graphical summary user browsing activity for a period of one day categorised into Hits and Kilobytes Downloaded. Also, an option has been included to view graphs for any single day that has a corresponding log file on the ContentKeeper appliance hard disk.
Other Enhancements
As with all ContentKeeper releases, there is an El-Guappo-sized plethora of minor enhancements and additions. For all ContentKeeper customers, these are available at nil cost and automatically installed "over-the-wire", without user intervention. Affected areas are:
- Personal Surfing Units
- Authenticate State Settings
- Username Resolution
- New ContentKeeper Agent (Version 3.8)
- Support up to 50 ContentKeeper Agents
- Syslog Configuration
- System Health Report
- SSL Coach Page
- Personality Module
- Staff Notification Coach Page
- Enhanced handling of non-standard URL encoding
- Enhanced blocking of Macromedia Flash content
- Enhancements to make recursive LDAP enumeration more efficient
- eDirectory Username Resolution
- Workstation Authentication Username Resolution
- Authenticate Blocking State
- Block/Unblock URLs in Control List menu (removal of URLs from Custom/Local Categories)
- Log Offloader
I have the full release notes available if you're interested to learn more. It's a 14 page pdf document, just call (02) 9231-8610 and I'll get a copy to you.
