What Is Websense?

By Author: Tom Paine
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Based in San Diego, California, Websense is a corporation that is involved in the design and production of web filtering software. Essentially, this software is utilized to help manage content control functions at the user end. Founded in 1994, most of the software tools designed and released by Websense are aimed at allowing owners of computer systems to control the content that may be accessed by the equipment under their control.

Who Uses Websense?

All across the world, corporations, non-profit agencies, libraries and schools, and government entities make use of Websense. Essentially, if there is a need to filter content within an organization, there is a good chance that Websense will be used to do the job. The software makes it possible to prevent the waste of resources or time by making it impossible to view content that is deemed inappropriate or unrelated to essential tasks by the owner of the computing equipment.

What Are Some Of The Protections Provided By Websense?

The filtering software does more than just block undesirable content. Along with limiting the flow of content, the software ...
... will also track the use of authorized personnel of Internet resources. That is, the system will log all usage of any desktop system. The detail is considered comprehensive, such as the risk class, URL, workstation used, date and time of the usage, and the category assigned to the content. A report of this data can be created by a system administrator, and may be sorted by user, workstation, date, and several other sorting criteria.

Categories allow a limited amount of work around of a blocked site. For example, if a site is blocked due to restricted keywords, but is in fact a site that is legitimately needed for work related research, the user may make use of a "continue" key and get around the block. The activity is still logged and thus subject to review later, but this feature allows the employee to continue with the task without requiring the assistance of a technical support person.

Deep Content Control is a feature that essentially allows for the recreation of the sequence of searches on the Internet. This makes it possible to see where a user went, how long he or she remained on the site, and what web site was visited next.