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Armourplate is a managed service with offices in the U.K. and Germany. Although the website claims to be "for U.K. business", the company says it is open to customers anywhere in the world. With the contact details and office hours limited to U.K. specifics, we feel the company (or its parent, Corpex) could be doing a lot more to draw attention to this.

EPA (Email Protection Agency) is a reseller for the Email Systems mail filtering services. As managed services settle down, we expect to see a lot more of the larger services being offered as rebadged services through other channels and service providers.

This service has been clearly aimed at large (or complicated) organizations that might be managing multiple domains. It can do clever tricks such as rewriting email addresses and handling subdomains that may not have been specifically configured. Administrators can be created with limited sets of responsibilities.

INSL's SpheriQ service started off well in our tests. A detailed setup process was well managed and we liked the inclusion of a relay test conducted against our mail servers.

IntY's MailDefender manages to squeeze quite a lot of mail filters and controls into an attractive and uncomplicated interface. We might have preferred the default first screen to be the useful quarantine summary (giving customer-wide mail totals), rather than the actual quarantining itself, but this was just a minor quibble.

MailFilter is a service with lots of good ideas, but it needs some final polish to really shine.

USB portable storage devices (or "sticks" as otherwise known) have become very popular as a handy means of carrying around your data, but what happens when you misplace the device? How safe is your data? OK, you could encrypt all the files on the device, but many users will simply not bother.

DigitalPersona Pro (formerly U are U Pro) for Active Directory is now at version 3.0 (the vendor tells us version 3.1 is now available) and is as slick as ever in its presentation, installation and general ease of use.

This might appear to be a slightly unusual product to include in this group test, but it qualifies as a potential biometric due to the use of signature verification, or fingerprints where applicable.

Saflink is a well-known and well-respected company within the biometrics arena, with many successful customized implementations to its credit. It seems like a natural progression, therefore, for it to bring its experience and expertise to the broader commercial product area.