July 18, 2017
Review: "ContentProtect: Ok for a small problem, but you can do better."
We have several remote classrooms that, for varying reasons, need to have web traffic restricted to a previously approved listing of sites. The computers at those locations have the ContentProtect client installed and configured to use computer specific accounts. The computers then allow the users to only access a certain list of sites needed for the classes offered in those rooms.
- The client is relatively light weight and doesn't impact other applications.
- The client isn't easily bypassed, so the user's are kept under restrictions.
- The configuration is relatively simple and easy to deploy.
- Our primary policy is a restricted list, so that does as advertised. We had one location that had blocks based on categories (adult, illegal, etc). We continually had issues with sites getting completely blocked due to unrelated content. For example, Yahoo had a beer ad on the page, alcohol was blocked, so Yahoo became blocked for the period of time that ad was displayed. We had this happen multiple times and eventually switched to a different solution at that location.
- I've had issues with their cloud portal not working. I don't have to edit our configuration often, but on numerous occasions, i was unable to get the configuration page to load after login, sometimes for days. The platform just wasn't stable when I needed it to be.
- We run many of our remote rooms as frozen (after logoff they reset to the image). This works fine most times, but when content protect needs a configuration change pushed down, someone needs to go 'thaw' the computers, download the updated configuration, and re-'freeze' the computer. It would be nice if that information was just dynamic from the cloud and didn't need to be pulled down.
- The categorization used for policies is very limited and not flexible or easily customizable.
- I could never get the usage reporting to work.