FaceTime Enterprise Edition strengthens manageability and security for messaging

The new version of Face Time's IM controls offer better capabilities for business

Instant messaging specialist FaceTime Communications has released a major upgrade to its flagship IM product for enterprises, offering better manageability, reporting and archiving features while ensuring security.

FaceTime Enterprise Edition combines IM Auditor 7.0,which allows firms to apply policies such as anti-spam, zero-day protection and content filtering settings, to approved IM traffic; and the Real Time Guardian appliance, which blocks all unapproved traffic at the network edge.

"The virus-writing community has realised the huge adoption of instant messaging and networks are [beginning] to be compromised," said FaceTime's European director, Nick Sears. "IT administrators are finding they've got a whole bunch of public IM clients on their network which they didn’t install, and they want to get control of this traffic."

The product includes new roles-based dashboards which give administrators and reviewers an overview of traffic information, and the ability to drill down into other functionality, while new security reports for spim (spam over IM) and zero-day URL blocking also offer more insight, said Sears.

"We've also seen an increase in the use of IM in web conferencing sessions, so we've [included WebEx support] to ensure firms can now police and archive these conversations," Sears added.

FaceTime Enterprise Edition has also built in Skype 2.0 support so that IT managers can control and enforce policy on this latest version of the peer-to-peer voice service.