WebTitan’s flexible policy engine allows feature blocking or access even within social networks. The issue of whether or not to allow employees to access Social Media websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter while on the clock is a hot topic in today’s work place. Every organisation has different requirement in terms of internet usage and access to social networks.
One of WebTitan’s big advantages is its sheer flexibility and the ease at which it allows users implement their own granular internet usage policies. Even within individual social networks WebTitan allows the user block elements or specific tools of that website / social network that the user believes may cause undue time wastage. For example some WebTitan users choose to allow access to Linkedin but revoke access to its mail client.
How to allow access to Linkedin but revoke access to its mail client?
There are two parts to this, firstly to block inbox access and secondly to block the option to compose a message:
- www.linkedin.com/inbox will need to be added to a custom category you create.
- Go to the Webtitan User Interface >Policies>Filtering Policies, here select your policy, then select “Categories tab” and disable the particular category you have created, eg; linkedin block inbox.
- To block the ability to compose a message, go to the Webtitan user interface>Filtering>Url Keywords and then click ‘add’ for the blacklisted url filter and in the “Keywords” file add; msgToConns Then Save
Timekeeping-In-Virtual Machines
Network Time Protocol (NTP) should not be enabled in a virtual environment, it is recommended (http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Timekeeping-In-VirtualMachines.pdf) that you use vmware-tools to synchronize the WebTitan clock with that of the host server. You can of course run NTP on the host server. VMware Tools resets the guest operating system clock to match the host clock upon start-up.
For this to work you need to ensure that you have configured your appliance to synchronize with the host clock using VMware tools. What do you need to do? In your VMware client, Edit Settings for the WebTitan appliance and select Options>VMware Tools and click the checkbox ‘Synchronize guest time with host’. You will need to suspend or shutdown WebTitan in order to be able to do this. Also, you should disable NTP in WebTitan (System Setup>Time) as this should only be used for ISO installations on standalone hardware.