The next product on my evaluation list is CMS’ Praetor. My initial impression is that this is a complex, full-featured product, and it’s expensive, too. (The fact that CMS is offering a 30% discount if you’re using a competing product helps reduce the sting somewhat.) It supports X- headers for filtering and has a range of quarantine options. However, I’m not crazy about three aspects of the product:
- it doesn’t use the Windows Installer, and its custom installer doesn’t bother to check for existing SMTP services on a machine
- it has its own separate administration program (which apparently can’t be installed on any machine other than the one running Praetor– so much for remote administration)
- it doesn’t integrate directly with Exchange. Although CMS says you can run it on your Exchange server, they seem to recommend running it on a separate box, so that’s what I’m doing. It didn’t coexist well with ISA in my very limited testing, so for now it’s on a separate machine.
I’m also not too impressed with the documentation; while it is complete, it’s formatted using the old “ransom note” style template, and it’s a reference. For a product this complex, a task-oriented doc would be much more useful.
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