Review: Workshare Protect Enterprise

For: Offers highly concentrated data protection with a lot of customisable features and policies.
Against: Can be difficult to deploy and may be pricey for very large installations.
Verdict: This product is awarded our Best Buy in the extrusion prevention application category for its ease of use, richness of features, excellent documentation and support.

The Workshare product contains a policy manager that can act as an information gateway, applying content filtering for more than 370 file types. It includes document rights restrictions, email blocking based upon content, and policy-control of PDF conversions. We were unable to compromise denied documents or find a way to get the system to violate its policy.

Documentation is well organised and includes a step-by-step deployment guide, installation wizard steps and brief instructions on which options should be selected or which fields should be filled in. It's written in clear, understandable language and is full of useful screen shots.

Support is excellent. An online learning centre offers documentation, training manuals, administrator guides, user guides and tutorials. There's also a large knowledge base and support plan options with varying degrees of support available.

At around US$30 per user per year, this license can become a fairly expensive proposition for the size of enterprise for which it is intended. However, this was the most complete product we looked at in terms of capabilities, and for a large organization with huge numbers of sensitive documents, trade secrets and proprietary information, this is an extremely powerful product.

We found Workshare Protect Enterprise Suite to be a scalable, easy-to-deploy enterprise-aware application and an appropriate choice for large enterprises with a variety of documents to protect. For its flexibility, richness of features, superb documentation and support, this product is our Best Buy in the extrusion prevention application class.

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