Pearl Software's Cyber Snoop 3.0 lets the small business system administrator monitor and restrict the Web activities of their PC users. This utility provides a powerful array of auditing and filter features, plus good reporting capabilities.

Once Cyber Snoop is installed on a system, administrators will need to spend some time configuring it. In testing, we found the spreadsheet-style interface convenient for adding or restricting specific Web sites. (One timesaving feature is the ability to import a text file of permissible or impermissible sites.) You can also filter Web content according to the PICs rating system. Another useful ability is that you can also add specific words that will be restricted. (You could, for example, stop block e-mail messages from being sent that have "job" or "resume.") The product also lets you customize the message shown to the user when a violation occurs.

What's impressive here is that Cyber Snoop not only logs Web sites visited, but also e-mail, ftp and chat rooms--virtually every Web access by PC users. Besides logging URLs and users, the product will recover the actual Web page content (and e-mail or chat message) sent. Reporting is done in a spreadsheet, which lets you sort by a variety of criteria. The product also exports to text (or HTML) for use with other packages.

Monitoring employee Web activity is a fact of life for most businesses today, and Cyber Snoop provides a good range of features that are both unobtrusive for the user and quite powerful for the administrator. --Richard Dragan

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000, Enterprise Edition is for large organizations, trading hubs, and digital marketplaces, and has support for integrating unlimited internal applications with unlimited trading partners over the Internet. The Enterprise Edition will support multiple processor and clustering deployments to handle even the largest transaction volumes. The BizTalk Server infrastructure helps you integrate, manage, and automate dynamic business processes by exchanging business documents among applications, and within or across organizational boundaries.

BizTalk Server helps you build processes that span not only applications, but also businesses, over the Internet. Graphical tools make it easy for analysts and developers to model and implement these processes. Easily integrate applications and businesses together with a host of graphical tools for building XML schema, performing schema transformation, establishing trading partner relationships over the Internet, and tracking and analyzing data and documents that are exchanged.

With XML and standard Internet transport and security technologies support, BizTalk Server 2000 extends the features of traditional e-commerce and electronic data interchange to entire e-commerce communities. With extensive support for public standards and specifications such as XML, EDI, HTTP, and SMTP, and security standards like public key encryption, digital signatures, and encryption, BizTalk Server 2000, Enterprise Edition ensures a high level of interoperability and security with your applications and business partners.

Wired households and small-business owners will love this WinProxy 3.0 package. The sleek, easily installed software will let you plug several PCs into the same (presumably, although not necessarily, high-speed) Internet connection.

By far, the hardest part of using WinProxy 3.0 is setting up the LAN, which you have to take care of separately and beforehand; after that's behind you, load up the surprisingly small program (about 25 MB), configure it, and start browsing. As a special blessing to administrators, Ositis Software has made WinProxy 3.0 nearly transparent to most users. The user or administrator will occasionally have to reconfigure software, but the clear, abundant documentation makes that task fairly simple.

WinProxy 3.0 provides a six-month subscription to Trend Micro's antivirus updates and Smart Computing's filtering definitions, so that you don't have to worry about sneaky attachments or unauthorized browsing. In fact, in addition to blacklisting, admins can create "whitelists" that restrict browsing to a prescribed set of sites, useful for schools or homes with children. With the power of a proxy server to reduce bandwidth use and the ease of use of a NAT server, WinProxy is unbeatable for most small networks. --Rob Lightner

--This review refers to the 5-user version.