DigitalPersona Pro Workgroup 5.1 review

A major downside to the growth in mobile working has to be the time and effort required to keep notebooks and other devices safe and secure. It's a task that DigitalPersona Pro addresses, at least for Windows, with a centrally managed suite of security tools that can be used to protect data and control access to remote and mobile computers.

There's a version of DigitalPersona Pro for large companies that can be integrated into Active Directory. For our review, however, we tested the Workgroup version, a simpler and cheaper implementation directed at small to medium sized businesses looking for a self-contained solution.

The core software is much the same in both, with a management server plus clients that need to be installed on every managed PC. For our tests we were given access to the soon to be released hosted version (due mid-July), which meant that the server part of the equation came pre-configured in the cloud.

Otherwise you'll need a Windows system to host the management server, although in a small company this can be a modest Vista or Windows 7 PC rather than a full-blown server system.

The usual browser-based console is used for management with a very basic quick-start menu which comes up when this first opens. We found the interface to be concise and easy to follow, the ability to group clients and apply security en masse further helping when it comes to easing management.

There's plenty of documentation too, and some tutorial videos on the web site, although we did think these a little simplistic. We also encountered a couple of bugs when using Firefox which we're told will be ironed out shortly. In the meantime, Internet Explorer is the preferred browser, and worked fine.

Our first big task was to configure our clients. Had we been using HP hardware this would have been easy, as you can use the preinstalled HP ProtectTools on such systems with no additional changes.

This is good news for those that have standardised on HP, and cheaper too (licences start at £12.50 ex VAT per managed system) but, like most small businesses, we were using a mix of hardware which meant having to distribute and install the DigitalPersona Pro client before we could do anything else.

And, because we only had a handful of clients, we did this manually, installing the client itself then a separate connectivity module to hook up to our hosted server.

Unfortunately, tools to automate the rollout aren't provided, which could be an issue on larger networks. However, the setup file is in standard .msi format so you could use Group Policy or third-party tools to take the strain.

Which is just as well because, if you want to encrypt remote hard disks, an extra bit of client software needs to be distributed and a couple more to take advantage of everything the product has to offer - making five modules in total.