Is ISA Server enough?

[Guest Guest]

I'm moving to a new school in September, where there isn't really effective internet filtering.

 

The company who have the service contract said in a meeting that they'd like to install an ISA Server to up the game a little and bring the filtering more in line with what there should be in place.

 

Personally I'm a huge fan of Censornet with it's active image filtering, google safe search, nightly updating and it's wonderful user / workstation / scheduling control and reporting.

 

Can ISA Server do all that I'm used to Censornet doing? Or does it need to work in partnership with something else?

 

Would an ISA Server be enough?

[FN-GM]

ISA server has no filtering by category built in at all. Unless you use thrid party software with it, for example websense. You can however restrict to a defined list of sites or block a defined list of sites.

 

Threat Management Gateway, the replacement for ISA has filtering. But you have to pay extra for it. It is not bundled with the product. Myself i have never used TMG filtering.

Edited June 3, 2010 by FN-GM
more detail added

[IanT]

Why on earth would anyone want to touch TMG.........just as bad as its previous version (ISA). Tell them to get a proper solution in.

[FN-GM]

Why on earth would anyone want to touch TMG.........just as bad as its previous version (ISA).

 

Extra features like the content filtering. It also has advanced anti-virus, anti-malware, and intrusion detection features. Another feature is the ability to inspect https traffic.

 

Some people are forced to use ISA becuase of the content filtering software for example Websense.

 

ISA & TMG is the way to go when protecting Sharpoint & OWA sites from external users. There is no other product that can publish sharepoint and owa sites like this.

 

ISA and TMG have a far better integration than allot of other similar products.

 

It is also very cheap when buying for education. Allot cheaper than other solutions.

 

Tell them to get a proper solution in.

 

Like what?

Edited June 3, 2010 by FN-GM

[ful56_uk]

We use tmg for basic filtering for our guest wireless, does the job. Simple to setup and we make use of the scanning on downloads as well

[FN-GM]

We use tmg for basic filtering for our guest wireless, does the job. Simple to setup and we make use of the scanning on downloads as well

 

Do you have a black list / white list?

[IanT]

I'm sure this would do all the jobs: SmoothWall | Web Content Filtering and Network Security

[ful56_uk]

Do you have a black list / white list?

 

We just use the built in categorys, on the web access rule it just says these categorys are banned, updates come from the update bit of tmg. We justed added it to our school agreement. The web access rule has a captivate portal attached to it so students have to login first before they get the Internet. Here is the list

 

http://www.gilham.org/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=740

Edited June 4, 2010 by ful56_uk

[FN-GM]

Sorry i misread you post, i thought you was talking about ISA

[SYNACK]

ISA would not be sufficient as it has no active filtering component, TMG is the current solution and does provide filtering abilities, have not used it personally yet but am moving to it shortly.

 

Extra features like the content filtering. It also has advanced anti-virus, anti-malware, and intrusion detection features. Another feature is the ability to inspect https traffic.

 

Some people are forced to use ISA becuase of the content filtering software for example Websense.

Was looking at their downloads page the other day and they now have a ISAPI filter for TMG so it should now work with TMG also.

 

ISA & TMG is the way to go when protecting Sharpoint & OWA sites from external users. There is no other product that can publish sharepoint and owa sites like this.

 

ISA and TMG have a far better integration than allot of other similar products.

 

It is also very cheap when buying for education. Allot cheaper than other solutions.

 

The other reason to consider TMG is its support of IP6 and 64bit allowing for the use of technologies like Windows 7 DirectAccess which would be much more difficult if not impossible with some of the other systems.

[tom_newton]

As many folk have pointed out - ISA on its own won't do a right lot.

You should ensure if you are starting from scratch that you get a filter with some credible answers for proxies, HTTPS and online gaming.

 

If you'd like to eval one of our filter units (either hardware, or software/VM like Censornet), let me know. I'm not going to "sell it to you" on here - a) that's naughty, b) i'm no salesman and c) i'm sure our happy customers will do that for me

[glennda]

I use Squid and Dansguardian (which i think is what smoothwall is based on AFAIK) you can download free blacklists aswell but tbh i don't use them, i only use it for blocking sites that the lea refuse to! works really well and is easy to configure enless you are after blocking users via group membership which i havnt quite got round to yet! Edited June 4, 2010 by robk
Slight Typo

[Roberto]

If they really mean "ISA Server" and it isn't the case that they actually meant "ForeFront TMG" but just haven't got used to calling the new version by its new name then frankly they're fools who shouldn't be allowed to touch an Internet connection, let alone protect one.

 

ISA server is very good at what it does (we use it in conjunction with websense, and we're very happy with it). It doesn't do content filtering in itself though, as others have said.

ForeFront TMG however, ups the game considerably. Whether it's enough for an educational environment I can't really say yet, but we plan to migrate to that plus Websense, Real Soon Now.