When we last looked at Smoothwall’s Corporate Guardian we found it to be an effective and affordable web content filtering solution, if a little complex to manage.

Since then it’s been updated, with a new reporting engine and enhanced policy-based configuration, together with optional anti-virus and anti-spam protection for email servers. We also found some enhancements designed to make the product simpler to use.

A software-based security tool, Corporate Guardian protects organisations from undesirable websites, viruses and other threats.

It uses Dynamic Content Analysis (DCA) to filter the content and structure of each webpage, rather than blocking on URL alone.

As with previous releases, the new Smoothwall software is easy to deploy. All you need is a reasonably quick PC with one or more Ethernet adapters and a bootable CD/DVD drive.

Boot from the Smoothwall CD-Rom and the hard disk will be wiped and a security-hardened Linux OS installed along with the Corporate Guardian application itself.

The product can also be run on a virtual host, with enhanced support for VMWare network drivers in this release, plus support for software Raid.

A browser-based interface is used to manage the Smoothwall software and, although tidied up, this is still quite cluttered.

However, there are some important changes which make the software a lot easier to set up and use. For example, the Guardian software is now installed with a default ‘safe’ configuration to block the kind of illegal and objectionable content that most small businesses would want to control.

You also get simultaneous support for transparent and non-transparent proxy deployment, plus support for NTLM authentication in transparent mode, resulting in fewer changes on client PCs. Two-factor authentications is also possible in this release.

Other features to help network managers include the ability to apply broad policy-based rules to all users, with precedence over any applied to groups. Hierarchical content control lists have also been added, plus the option to filter cookies and HTML headers and a new soft-block option, to issue warnings rather than completely block access to specific content.

A lot has changed on the reporting front too. Heavily dependent on third-party software in previous versions, the reporting engine has been revamped this time with built-in report templates that can be customised and saved.

There’s integrated support to for drill-down access to detailed data, plus reports can now be produced in PDF and Excel format as well as HTML. Guardian reports can also be scheduled and distributed automatically by email.

Elsewhere, Smoothwall is now a member of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), enabling it to include IWF block-lists in its products. Updates to IWF lists are also made incrementally in this version, making the process a lot quicker.

There’s still a lot you can configure in Corporate Guardian 6 and a fair degree of technical knowledge is required to take advantage of some features. However, by taking the various ‘recommended’ options we didn’t find it too hard to manage and were impressed with how quickly we could get it working.

Furthermore, you can now also protect email servers with anti-virus and anti-spam tools by adding the optional Smoothzap module (£150 ex Vat), making it a more complete small-business security solution.