Winfrasoft Gateway Appliance 9500-DE review

Web filtering rules are added to policies by specifying which categories of sites are to be blocked or allowed. You have over seventy categories to pick and choose from and TMG also provides a useful URL query tool. The URL filters worked well during testing with very few dodgy web sites getting past them. Rules also make the appliance very flexible as you can apply web browsing policies to different AD users and groups, effectively creating a range of AUPs.

A barrage of virus scanning engines is available as the subscription includes those from Kaspersky, Authentium, Norman, VirusBuster and Microsoft. These can be applied to inbound and outbound traffic and you can choose which ones you want active.

Optional anti-spam measures are supplied by Microsoft’s ForeFront Protection for Exchange (FPE) which doesn’t support third party mail servers. However, it snaps neatly into the TMG console and provides wizards to help with specifying Exchange servers and mail domains.

FPE applies a spam confidence level scoring system to email and offers three actions where you can delete, reject or quarantine messages. File attachment filters can be applied to inbound and outbound traffic and message bodies scanned for specific keywords and phrases.

With mainstream support for ISA Server 2006 ending less than a year from now, it makes sense for existing users of that product to think about upgrading to TMG 2010. However, this can’t be done in place as the two products are not compatible with each other. The most cost effective method is to deploy TMG as an appliance rather than install it all yourself and the 9500-DE is a good choice for larger businesses. It comes with everything ready to go straight from the box, Winfrasoft‘s extra software adds a lot of value and its quality hardware means you’re not locked into a proprietary solution.

So what's our verdict?