NetSupport Manager is a complete support system that you host on your own network. That doesn’t mean it’s limited to local connections, however: it’s fully capable of supporting remote workers over the internet, and on private wide-area connections. The remote access features are included in the price, and let you link remote offices and homeworkers to the main site with a choice of encryption options, including 256-bit AES.

Deployment is inevitably a little more complex than with a cloud-hosted support solution, but it’s still straightforward. To handle off-site connections, the gateway server component needs to be installed on a Windows PC that’s accessible over the internet, which you can achieve by port forwarding or by placing the host in your DMZ. You then just need to send the NetSupport client installer to remote users, along with a configuration file containing the details of the gateway server. 

Once the software is set up, it’s very secure, as the main server, gateway and clients must all possess the same security key, and an integrated firewall ensures that no unauthorised connection attempts can get through to your internal network. Session encryption is fully supported, and you can optionally restrict which technicians are able to access which remote systems.

Installation on local Windows clients is even easier: the Deploy tool can scan the local network and push the software to selected systems for automatic installation. macOS clients require manual installation, but NetSupport tells us it’s looking into ways of streamlining the process. 

All clients can be browsed from the Control console, whether they’re connected locally or over the internet. Systems are sorted into a tree view in the left pane, with dynamic grouping allowing you to sort clients by criteria such as operating system, hardware class and geographical location. Selecting a group shows all members in the opposite pane, and a monitor mode displays scalable thumbnails of each one’s screen, so you can watch user activity in real-time.

Connecting to a client is a cinch: double-clicking on its icon initiates a desktop session, while specific functions (such as file transfer) can be accessed from the dropdown menu, a row of shortcut icons or directly from the Control host’s Explorer view.

Once you’re in, the main View app shows you the client’s screen, with a ribbon bar at the top for fast access to a wealth of support tools. You can switch between controlling, sharing or passively viewing the screen, launch local apps, have text and audio chats, share clipboards, take screen captures and reboot the client.

There’s also a selection of useful extras. The free PIN Connect server allows a technician and user to instantly start a support session by entering the same unique PIN, meaning there’s no need for support staff to hunt through a long list of clients to find the right one.

Then there’s the file-distribution tool, which allows the operator to send a set of files to multiple clients in one go. The software also includes the facility to show your own screen to single or multiple clients – potentially useful for training. You can even capture recordings of control system activity, save them locally and replay them to clients.

A final welcome feature is an extensive inventory tool, which captures hardware details along with lists of hot-fixes, installed applications, processes and services – even allowing you to remotely stop, start and pause the latter.

SMBs that want the full spectrum of support options for both on-premises and remote users will find NetSupport Manager more than meets their needs. It offers a wealth of secure and versatile support features, and its perpetual licensing model takes away any worries about ongoing costs.

Kaspersky offers an endpoint protection answer for every business. Large firms that want total control can choose its on-site Endpoint Security for Business products, while smaller companies that don’t want to run their own host server have two cloud-managed solutions to choose from.

We tested Kaspersky’s Endpoint Security Cloud, which is managed entirely from a cloud portal and protects ten to 150 Windows systems and Macs. Licensing is flexible, with each user licence supporting one workstation, laptop or server, plus two iOS or Android mobile devices.

The standard service includes protection against all types of malware and ransomware, a client firewall, a network attack blocker and vulnerability scanning. There’s also a new cloud discovery feature that lets you keep an eye on email, file-sharing, messaging and social networking services being accessed by users.

If you need more, you can move up to the Plus version, which adds Office 365 protection, URL-based web filtering, endpoint device controls, encryption and patch management. The Plus service lets you block specific cloud services too, while the regular tier only monitors them.

We found deployment pleasingly simple: the agent can be downloaded and installed directly from the web portal, or you can email a download link to users. Either way, it takes around five minutes to set up, with a further 15-minute wait while the client registers its licence.

Once that’s done, protection starts immediately with a default security policy that enables everything Kaspersky has to offer. If you want to customise your coverage, it’s easy to create your own policies, organise clients into groups and grant admin rights to specific users. For Windows systems there are three levels of file and web threat protection on offer, and you can choose whether to scan emails for dodgy content and enable network threat protection. If you have the Plus version, you can browse all detected cloud services and decide whether to block any. Macs get file, web and network threat protection, but mail and cloud discovery are off the menu.

It’s a varied offering for mobile users too. Android devices benefit from antivirus protection plus web and app controls, while for iOS it’s more about access security: the portal lets you create APNs certificates, allowing you to choose what device features are accessible, set a screen lock and password policy, apply simple website keyword blocking and restrict which networks can be joined.

As you’d hope, the whole system is highly responsive to threats. When we tried introducing malware to some of our test Windows 10 systems, the local client blocked them immediately, with email alerts landing in our administrative mailbox barely ten seconds later.

The web portal is very informative. A graph displays the top five categories of cloud services in use and lets you drill down to see exactly who’s using what; our only slight niggle is that this took several hours to populate with details on detected services. Below, more graphs show device protection status, the OS spread, detected threats and the results of daily vulnerability scans. There’s a good set of predefined reports too, covering protection status, threats, database updates and cloud discovery, which can be exported in CSV and PDF formats.

If your business is of a suitable size, Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud is great value, especially since each licence includes protection for two mobile devices. The cloud discovery component can be a little slow, but endpoint protection doesn’t get any stronger than this and the cloud portal is very easy to work with.

Torn between cloud-hosted and on-premises support? With Netop’s Remote Control you don’t need to choose one or the other. An annual subscription enables cloud-based support, which can be easily combined with on-premises services by adding a perpetual licence. 

If you’ve encountered the software before, you’ll note some new features in this latest version, including email notifications for connection attempts, 64-bit macOS and Linux agents, plus improved screen scaling for the browser-based client. There’s also a new optional add-on called Netop OnDemand, which supports on-demand connections and makes it possible to access iOS devices.

What hasn’t changed is Netop’s tough security measures. All sessions are 256-bit AES encrypted, and host installation packages can also be customised to only allow specific features, with multi-factor authentication optionally enforced. Once a connection is made, there are strict limits to what technicians can do: permissions can be granted on a per-user and per-group basis, or you can define and assign roles to restrict activities such as keyboard and mouse control, chat and file transfer.

Getting the agent onto Windows systems is a breeze. The web portal allows you to download the client installer directly or email a link to selected users; once the client has loaded, it provides always-on remote access, asking the user to explicitly permit connections when their device is unattended.

Mac users can be supported too, but setting this up involves some extra legwork, as the Netop host DMG package must be manually installed on each host. We also had to manually edit the host configuration file to add the Netop portal web address and account enrolment key. With this done, everything worked as expected.

When it’s time to start a remote session, support staff have the option of using a simple browser-based console, which provides basic remote control plus options to lock, restart or shut down the host. However, it’s the work of a few moments to download and install the full Netop Guest app: this can then be launched directly from the portal, giving you access to the complete range of features. Along with remote control, its ribbon menu offers file transfer, messaging, text and audio chat, remote command and application execution, Registry editing, plus keyboard and mouse controls. There’s also a Demonstrate tool that lets technicians share their screen with the host.

Since the Guest app connects to your portal account, you can also see and access all registered hosts from within its interface. If you’ve paid for an on-site installation, you’ll see a LAN connection profile within the Guest app too, allowing you to access hosts on the same network without going through the web portal.

While on-demand support isn’t included as standard, you can add it via the Netop OnDemand service, which costs £187 per technician per year. This snaps neatly into the web portal and lets you set up quick remote sessions with users who don’t have the Netop host software installed, protecting each session with a unique nine-digit code.

OnDemand also allows technicians to connect to iOS devices, once the user has installed the iOS app and entered the requisite security code. As usual, Apple’s strict security model means you can’t take remote control of an iOS device, but the app allows a technician to view its entire screen and guide the user through problem-solving steps. 

Businesses with evolving needs will appreciate how Netop Remote Control gives you the freedom to choose cloud-based, local and hybrid support. It would be nice if Mac deployment were slicker, but once everything’s in place, the software is easy to use, well stocked with features, and reassuringly secure.

There’s no shortage of online backup solutions for SMBs to choose from, but BackupVault stands out thanks to its simple pricing scheme. The price is based solely on how much data you want backed up to the cloud, so you pay a predictable monthly fee with no nasty surprises.

Don’t confuse this with competing services that charge according to how much storage your data takes up once compressed. That can be good value, but compression ratios are dependent on the type of data you’re working with, and the provider is under no obligation to use the most efficient algorithms – so your outgoings could fluctuate significantly from month to month as your backup needs evolve.

Prices for BackupVault start at £24 per month for 50GB, and you can add capacity at any time in increments of 100GB, which get cheaper as you move up the scale. The standard service includes round-the-clock UK telephone support and a rolling 30 to 60-day retention period for all file versions, with backups older than 31 days automatically deleted on the first day of the following month. If you need more than this, you can pay a 10% supplement to upgrade to a 12-month retention period.

For small offices with one server and a few PCs, the BackupVault client can be installed on each system and configured locally. For larger deployments, BackupVault also offers a free central management console app that provides remote client access, system recovery and bare-metal restore services. To get set up you just need to enter your host name, account password and encryption key. It’s imperative that you keep a record of this key, as it’s needed to restore your data and BackupVault has no access to it.

The client interface is easy to use, showing you both local and network storage and allowing you to choose what you want to protect. You can back up individual files and folders, entire drives or complete systems, and extra options become available if certain apps or services are installed. On our Hyper-V host, an additional tab appeared for VM backups, while our Exchange and SQL Server hosts had tabs for the relevant apps. The software let us click to select individual SQL databases for backup, although when it came to Exchange we were only able to select entire data stores because BackupVault doesn’t support message-level backups.

Backups can be run on demand or scheduled at regular intervals, and for hybrid strategies you can copy data to a secondary location – such as a local NAS appliance – as well as your cloud storage. If you have a large amount of data to protect, you can hit the ground running with a free vault-seeding service, which lets you send in your first set of backups on encrypted USB media, rather than waiting for it all to upload over the internet.

BackupVault passed our restore tests with flying colours. The recovery procedures are easy to use and we’re big fans of the InstantData feature, which uses a combination of sparse files and a proprietary kernel driver to greatly reduce the wait time to access files stored in the cloud: we found that this allowed us to start working on recovered files just a few seconds after the restore process had started. We also tried restoring a 2.4GB MP4 video file from the cloud using InstantData and, while playback was quite jerky, we were able to skip to any part of the video and view it within 20 seconds of starting the restore. With conventional restore methods over our fibre broadband connection, we’d have been looking at a wait of around 90 minutes before being able to open the file. 

Lastly, there’s a handy option to restore your files to a local virtual drive, meaning you can check back on older versions without replacing current ones or creating potentially confusing duplicates.

BackupVault Cloud Backup is a fine choice for SMBs, providing easily managed data protection services and almost instant access to your backed-up data – and its simple pricing structure keeps storage costs under control as well.

Solarwinds’ Dameware Remote Everywhere lives up to its name, with a hosted design that allows technicians to reach out to users no matter where they are. Its pricing model is simple too: a £355 annual licence lets one technician support up to 500 endpoints, with additional licences enabling more concurrent sessions. That makes it great value for companies of a certain size, although those with smaller headcounts will very likely find other options more cost-effective.

Deployment starts at the web portal, where you create accounts for your technicians and set privileges for each one, determining which tools they’re allowed to use. Technicians can also be assigned to particular departments, which allows support requests to be automatically routed to the right person.

The web portal also hosts the client software for Windows, Mac and Linux endpoints, to which you can apply profiles determining what features are available. A master password option lets you restrict access to the agent, and endpoints can be set to automatically lock when unattended sessions finish.

Technicians, meanwhile, get their own personal console app. From here, they can browse and connect to any endpoint that has the agent installed, and launch on-demand support sessions for systems that don’t have the software. Note that there’s no way for end users to initiate an on-demand session themselves: the technician has to make the first move. 

After that it’s plain sailing. Once the correct six-digit PIN is provided, the on-demand applet fires up and opens the remote access session, automatically removing itself when either party disconnects.

In both on-demand and always-on sessions, technicians get access to the fully featured desktop console, with tools for file transfer, remote Registry editing and the option to switch between the desktop view and a command prompt. Support staff can also share their own screen with the user, start audio or video calls and tell the endpoint to reboot, restart or shut down. Sessions can be recorded too, with video uploaded to the web portal’s reports section.

While the Dameware control software is richly featured, there’s no browser-based alternative, as offered by most other products. However, technicians can use a mobile device to provide support when away from their desks, via the iOS and Android apps. We tried this on an iPad and had no problem logging into a technician account, browsing endpoints, connecting for remote control and creating on-demand sessions. 

You can provide support to users on iOS devices via the Dameware Remote Support app – although, as expected, this provides only remote viewing, and doesn’t let support staff take control of the device.

Alongside all of this, Dameware lets technicians extract detailed system inventories from connected devices, including hardware configuration and serial numbers, network addresses, installed applications and Windows updates, both pending and installed. Reporting options are extensive too, with the portal showing session histories that can be filtered for details such as session IDs and user names. And if you want to check on technician performance, you can even send out surveys to ask end users about their experience.

Dameware Remote Everywhere’s pricing won’t work for every business. However, for larger organisations with a few hundred endpoints to look after it’s an excellent package, delivering an impressive range of secure support features that are easy to manage and use. 

​Now into its third year, Voip Exchange is purpose-built as a complete cloud-hosted SMB service that can be rolled out with a minimum of training.

Deployment is a breeze too: a project engineer was assigned to discuss our requirements, and then set up an account with preconfigured phone numbers and a base set of users as per our instructions. 

Voip Unlimited also supplies handsets, offering a choice of Snom and Yealink models. We opted for Yealink T48S and T23G sets, and these came preconfigured for each user, so we had only to connect them to the lab’s PoE switch and they were instantly provisioned. Don’t worry if you’re switching from a different VoIP provider: any IP phones you already own will, where possible, be reprovisioned for Voip Exchange.

As usual, management is carried out from a web portal, and this is very easy to navigate. Our account had a single top-level site, but businesses with offices in multiple locations can create subsites for each one, which can all be centrally managed.

Creating new users is a cinch, thanks to a wizard that takes you through each step. We were prompted to provide names, email addresses and mobile numbers, then to indicate which site and department each user was a member of; a DDI (direct dial in) number was then doled out for their preassigned handset.

Once you’ve created your users, you can additionally assign them to huntgroups, so that incoming calls to one person’s number will cause all phones in their group to ring at once – or you can choose round robin mode, to call each phone in order. If no one picks up after a timeout period of up to two minutes, you can specify whether the call should be forwarded to a different user or group, to another huntgroup, to an external number or to an interactive voice assistant. 

This last feature is particularly versatile. Callers can be played a custom message, and presented with a menu of up to 12 options – each of which supports the same actions as available for huntgroups, making it almost impossible for an incoming call to be missed.

There are also several settings that users can configure for themselves, either at the point of enrolment or later on. You can set a personal greeting message by uploading a WAV file to your portal, and configure either call forwarding or call twinning, which causes a second number (such as a mobile) to ring simultaneously for incoming calls. The portal also lets you check your voicemail and access the webphone app; install the Voip Exchange Chrome extension and you can initiate calls directly from web pages too.

Almost all of these features are included in the basic pay-as-you-go Voip Exchange package, which costs £8.50 per user per month – the only thing that’s missing is voice recording, which adds an extra £1 per month. Call packages start at £3.50 per user per month, which provides 3,000 minutes per user for calls to landlines and mobiles.

Although web calling is included, you also have to pay a little extra for mobile support: the Android and iOS apps (which are in fact customised versions of the Zoiper softphone app) cost £2 per user each month. We tried the iOS version and found it superbly easy to use, taking mere seconds to register by scanning the unique QR code presented in the user portal.

In all, Voip Exchange is a classy service that SMBs will love: it’s exceptionally easy to deploy and has a strong set of features included in the price. 

​Given an explosion of remote working, with video conferencing thrust in the spotlight, we may have once expected Skype to seize the moment. After all, this is a platform that was eponymous with the concept of video communication not too long ago. 

This titan of video conferencing has enjoyed something of a comeback in recent weeks, but it’s been overshadowed by the emergence of Zoom and Google’s own services.

Times have indeed changed, and the platform has languished in the shadow of these competitors as well as Microsoft’s enterprise-centric Teams service. There’s no better symbol for this decline than Microsoft’s decision to phase out Skype for Business.

Regardless, the free version of Skype still plays a vital role for many small businesses. The platform has undergone a 70% surge in activity during the coronavirus pandemic, in addition to a 220% explosion in Skype-to-Skype calls. In a market now saturated with rivals, does the legacy service have the legs to keep itself relevant?

Skype review: Design and UI

Skype’s user interface (UI) has undergone several overhauls through the years and, today, remains in keeping with Microsoft’s bold ‘fluent design’ aesthetic. 

While the platform adheres to these design principles well, its minimalist aspirations don’t match up with how cluttered the interface is. On desktop, users are immediately met with a well-sized primary chat window to the right, beside a pale-toned sidebar into which most of the app’s functions are squashed. By default, the oversized pane shows a welcome screen.

Using this smaller panel you can cycle between recent chats, recent calls, contacts, and recent notifications. The interface also includes a ‘new call’ and new chat’ button as well as the recently launched ‘meet now’ feature. Double-clicking on any contact will beam your chat history to the right-hand panel. This mess of icons means it can prove fiddly to actually get to the function you need, so could have benefited from icons being spaced out more across the interface.

Despite this clash, navigating to the ‘Appearance’ tab in the Settings menu gives users a decent array of cosmetic options, including a fabulous dark mode, a choice between several accent tones, and two high-contrast settings.

Where the UI does excel is while dialled into a meeting. Only a handful of buttons remain on show, allowing participants to fill the remainder of the display. Advanced functions, instead of lining a portion of the screen, are hidden away in a ‘more options’ menu.

Skype review: Features and functionality

Skype offers a full array of basic features as well as a handful of more advanced features that have found their way into Skype from other services over the years. These include screen sharing and a neat real-time transcription toggle.

‘Meet now’, which allows users to send non-users a meeting link without them having to download the software, is an example of a feature that’s only made its way into the service following the meteoric rise of Zoom on the coattails of a similar feature. Putting aside the speculation as to why Skype’s only just rolled out a similar feature, it’s a welcome addition and boosts the user experience considerably.

The ‘blur background’ toggle, meanwhile, singles you out as the video subject effectively, while you can also add custom background images. Zoom goes one step further with a handful of preloaded images, and support for video, although lacks the blur background toggle – which is perhaps of more interest to business users than zany effects.

Although Skype includes several advanced features, one can’t help but feel limited by the way they’ve been implemented.  While meetings can be recorded, the files are hidden away in your chat ‘gallery’ and are only available for 30 days. Sure, they can be subsequently saved onto your hard drive, but what if you just wanted these files beamed straight into your PC? Other applications include functionality for that. Finally, while you can share your screen at the touch of a button, other video conferencing services allow participants to share a portion of the screen, an individual app or even a ‘digital whiteboard’.

To its detriment, we did encounter a few glitches here and there. These manifested primarily as features taking a long time to work properly, and excessive menu loading-time. One fundamentally disruptive bug we encountered involved the live transcription feature in a meeting started using ‘Meet now’. When activated, the application crashed only a few seconds later, after several attempts. This was odd because on several separate occasions, however, it worked flawlessly.

Skype review: Video and meeting experience

Alongside the lesser-known Lifesize, Skype is the only leading conferencing platform to offer 1080p video quality on its free tier, with Zoom and Hangouts limited to 720p. The maximum number of participants is also a strong 50, bested only by Zoom’s limit of 100. The latter, however, is limited in the way that meetings disconnect after 40 minutes, whereas Skype offers unlimited free video conferencing.

The main advantage Skype holds over its rivals is a clean UI while in meetings, to the extent it feels like a different app than that of the cluttered home screen. Meeting participants can be organised in several ways, but can only occupy a maximum of four large quadrants at any one time. Skype offers a neat way to work around this, with excess participants occupying small bubbles along the top which can be dragged into any quadrant to replace participants at any time. 

Most functions beyond the most basic are tucked away in an expandable folder in the bottom-right-hand corner of the interface. From here, users can record meetings, toggle subtitles, and perform other functions. The live transcription feature is neat too, with real-time dialogue generated in small text without obscuring anybody’s face. 

Skype review: Security provisions

All Skype-to-Skype calls, messages and file transfers are encrypted, according to the developers, through 256-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) protection. Should users wish to make calls to landlines, these conversations will take place over the standard public switched telephone network (PSTN) so won’t enjoy the same level of protection.

Instant messaging, meanwhile, is protected using transport-level security (TLS) which guards messages between the Skype client and the chat service in the platform’s cloud, as well as AES when communications are sent between two Skype clients. 

Voice messages are encrypted on delivery, however once they have been listened to, the files are transferred from Skype servers to users’ local machines, where they are stored in an unencrypted format.

Beyond that, there are a set of standard protections built-into the platform to protect user privacy including automatically screening calls or messages from individuals who aren’t contacts. Users can also determine how long message history, chat titles, and videos will last before these are deleted. Files and voice messages as well as call recordings will be removed from the cloud after 30 days, although users can save them to their machines.

Skype review: Verdict

While there’s no doubting how far Skype has fallen in popularity from its peak around a decade ago, the most basic version of the legacy video conferencing suite still has plenty to offer new and existing users. 

A host of basic features, strong security provisions and advanced tools like real-time transcription and the capacity to record meetings may indeed be enough to entice you away from increasingly popular alternatives. This is in addition to 1080p support, a healthy maximum participant cap, and no meeting time limit, if you’re willing to stomach a couple of minor glitches here and there.

Although a couple of these advanced features might fall short in places, there’s plenty to shout about. The eleventh-hour addition of a ‘meet now’ feature, too, means the classic version of Skype has been sufficiently retrofitted for the modern age.

​The first thing that strikes you about the SkyKey is its size. Weighing a mere 79g, it will fit easily in the palm of your hand, with a footprint of just 59 x 100mm. Yet this miniscule appliance can manage up to 100 EnGenius EWS access points (APs) and network switches via the free ezMaster software.

Indeed, it’s so tiny that you may not need to make use of the included mounting brackets: EnGenius has cleverly given the box a magnetic back, allowing it to clamp securely to the side of a rack cabinet. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports sit on the left-hand side, while on the other end there’s a microSD card slot for configuration backups, plus a socket for the optional power adapter. You may not need that, though, as the first Ethernet socket also supports PoE.

Deploying the SkyKey took just a few minutes. After connecting the appliance to the lab’s PoE switch, we created a free EnGenius Cloud account, then loaded up the iOS app on our iPad and added the SkyKey by scanning in the QR code on its base. 

The EnGenius Cloud portal has dual roles. As well as providing remote access to ezMaster hosts, it also directly manages EnGenius’ ECW series of wireless APs and ECS switches. The mobile app is geared up for the cloud service, however, so it can show details of registered SkyKey hosts but not the wireless networks they’re managing. What you can do, though, is visit the page that lists all ezMaster hosts, where you can connect to its local web interface for further configuration. 

Before adding APs, it’s worth defining your wireless settings. These are created as per-site “projects”, which can contain multiple AP groups for different types of wireless services. Each group supports up to eight SSIDs with its own encryption scheme, along with options for SSID masking, L2 isolation (so wireless clients can’t see each other) and VLAN isolation. 

There are also extensive captive portal features, which can be used to direct users to custom splash pages, present AUPs, apply ezMaster, RADIUS or external Cloud4Wi authentication, redirect visitors to a specific web page after login and keep them within walled gardens. A Wi-Fi scheduler function also lets you disable individual SSIDs and APs for specific periods during the day.

To put all of this to the test, we used a mixture of EnGenius EWS357AP Wi-Fi 6 and EWS330AP Wi-Fi 5 APs. Connecting them really couldn’t have been easier: once online, they popped up in the ezMaster console as pending approval, and we were able to claim them with a just few clicks. Helpfully, the SkyKey immediately checked each AP’s firmware on connection and offered to upgrade them all for us.

The next step is to assign your APs to a group. This takes about 30 seconds to complete, after which they’ll start broadcasting whatever wireless services you’ve defined. Local management is disabled on connected APs as they’re now controlled by the SkyKey: you can still connect to each one’s web portal, but the only operations available are viewing statistics and rebooting. 

The SkyKey’s web console, meanwhile, presents a status view of SkyKey resource usage, projects, APs and managed switches. Selecting a project opens up a new screen with a wide range of AP and client-monitoring features. The topology view only works if you have an EWS switch, but you can use the embedded map view to see the physical location of connected APs. We were also able to survey all connected clients and see a range of statistics, including real-time traffic graphs for selected APs. 

While the SkyKey offers a decent set of management and monitoring features, it’s not as capable or versatile as the Cloud Key Gen2 appliance we normally use in the lab to manage our UniFi NanoHD APs. However, the SkyKey is cheaper, not to mention more conveniently sized, making it an attractive plug-and-play solution for small businesses wanting to manage an EnGenius-branded wireless network.

​Since the world has gone into lockdown and we’ve all had to connect with friends, family and colleagues via videoconferencing, three services have come to the fore: Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Hangouts. 

Hangouts is a natural choice for most, as it comes free with a Gmail account and is almost foolproof, which is why it has proved so popular for both businesses and consumers. It also hasn’t been plagued by security issues like Zoom, which has seen a significant backlash in recent months. But with these services gaining importance, is Hangouts right for you?

Google Hangouts review: Pricing plans

Google’s collaborations tools can be a little confusing, especially as it has Hangouts and Meet, which are two separate services that almost do the same thing. The way to differentiate them is that Meets is the version that comes bundled in with paid G Suite plans, while Hangouts is available to free users. Meets boasts a few more enterprise-friendly features than Hangouts, including support for meeting-room infrastructure and meeting recording – so you can either have a free, but limited, version of the software or you can opt for a business account and have the version with more functionality. 

Basic G Suite accounts including Meet start from £4.14 per month with a rudimentary suite of features such as a limit of 100 participants on calls and 30GB of Drive cloud storage. A ‘Business’ option which costs £8.28 per month increases the participation limit to 150 and adds unlimited Drive storage. The final tier is a £20 enterprise champion that allows for up to 250 participants on calls, unlimited storage and, quite crucially, significantly greater security options. 

Google Hangouts review: Interface

G Suite had already seen quite significant growth before the coronavirus pandemic forced us all into lockdown, but services like Hangouts have been a key tool for many individuals and businesses since the outbreak. One reason for this is that it’s ever so simple to use via either the app or the web version. 

The interface, launched from a web browser, has giant buttons for call, video and chats right there in the middle so you can jump into any of the three straight away. To the left of that is the instant messenger feature which is again easy-peasy. There are also icons to open the menu and contacts pages in the top left corner, although a couple are somewhat redundant.

Such is the ease of its interface, the least tech-savvy person in your office – or even your nan – will have no trouble navigating it. This isn’t something to be totally thankful for though, as the main reason it’s so simple is because there isn’t a whole lot of things to do on it. Compared to features offered by other services like Zoom or Teams, such as customisable backgrounds and collaborative whiteboards,  Hangouts is relatively basic no matter which tier you pay for. 

Google Hangouts review: Call Quality

Call quality on Hangouts is decent enough; its basic function works, in that you can see and hear the other callers, but it could be better. Competitors like Zoom and Microsoft Teams are doing it better with clearer calls. Obviously, any participants on your call with poor Wi-Fi will cause a bit of fuzziness, but it’s an almost constant problem with Hangouts, regardless of broadband, where other callers are blurred behind extreme pixelation or their voice is subject to a slight delay. Inevitably, this results in people talking over each other, which can be frustrating and awkward during meetings. 

Google Hangouts review: Integrations

Integrating with other apps is arguably where Hangouts and G Suite is at its best. As the videoconferencing service within Google’s suite of apps, it’s one click away from Google Docs or Drive and can even be launched from Gmail. Setting up meetings from your shared work calendar is utterly foolproof. 

It’s arguably helped other comms platforms too, such as Slack, which integrates with G Suite seamlessly. Just typing ‘/Hangouts’ within a channel or private message is all you need to launch a call.

Google Hangouts review: Features

Security is a big concern with videoconferencing platforms right now – particularly Zoom – but Hangouts has a bit of an advantage in this area as it comes bundled in with G Suite. For example, anyone that doesn’t have access to the shared calendar will have to be verified before they join a call. There are also preventative functions to stop unwanted participants from hijacking your call. All of these elements are set as default, so most users will hardly notice them. 

As for other features, Hangouts has very little to offer. It is, after all, a free service and you are literally getting what you pay for: basic video calling, instant messaging and the ability to share your screen with other participants. This is probably a big factor in Google making Meet available for free until September.  

Google Hangouts review: Verdict

While the pandemic continues, so will the increased use of videoconferencing platforms. And, given the length of the lockdown, it’s worth investing in a service. Hangouts is free but it’s very limited. So choosing something paid for might be a better option. Currently, services like Zoom are free, so it may be worth trialling a few before a final decision is made. 

Meet being available for free until September does change things and it probably is worth choosing that over Hangouts while in lockdown. But, if you want a bog-standard service without the fuss, the latter is for you. Sure, you’ll have less functionality, like not being able to change your background into something funny, but this is the new normal for most businesses, and your boss probably isn’t going to care whether or not you can make it look like you’re calling from space.  

​We’ve all experienced that sinking feeling after accidentally sending an email to the wrong recipient. If it’s an internal message, you may still be able to recall it – but if it’s gone to someone outside of your company there may be nothing you can do. At best, it’s an embarrassment; at worst, if your message contained confidential or personal information, you could be looking at a hefty fine.

SafeSend Email Security is a small add-in for Outlook that’s designed to eliminate that risk. It achieves this partly by requiring users to review all external email recipients and confirm that they’re correct before the message can be released. 

There’s a lot more than this to the software, however. It also provides extensive data loss prevention (DLP) services, allowing you to scan email subjects, message contents and attachments for specific keywords and patterns. If a match is found, the software can request confirmation before sending or even block transmission altogether.

Deployment is a cinch. The add-in can either be installed manually or distributed and managed centrally using a group policy. It works with all versions of Outlook from 2007 upwards, and there’s also a web version for Outlook 365 and OWA. We had no problems using a GPO to distribute the MSI package to the Windows clients in our lab: once they had logged into the domain and been authenticated, the add-in was silently deployed without the need for any user interaction.

Training requirements are minimal. Users just need to be advised that the first time they load Outlook, SafeSend will pop up a message to confirm their internal email domain. Once this is done, any attempt to send a message outside of the organisation will bring up a confirmation prompt.

That might sound a little intrusive, but the dialog is clean and simple, showing all the email’s recipients (including those in the “Cc:” field) with a tickbox next to each one. If something’s not right, you can remove any unwanted recipients before sending, or reopen the message for further editing.

Central management is just as easy. SafeSend provides ADMX/ADML files for deployment on your domain controller; with these copied across to the PolicyDefinations folder on our Active Directory server, we were able to create a customised SafeSend GPO for all authenticated users.

This process can be a little time-consuming, but that’s only because the SafeSend GPO has over 150 options to configure. Some of these are simple controls, such as preventing users from removing SafeSend, adding extra safe domains and deciding whether to enable the “Select All” tickbox. More advanced options let you do things such as limiting the number of message recipients, detecting bulk emails and adding custom footer messages.

In addition, you can, of course, customise SafeSend’s DLP policies. These are extremely versatile as you can create multiple rules to detect specific strings, credit card numbers and even regular expressions. To ensure nothing slips through the net, SafeSend scans not only the text of outgoing emails but also attachments in various formats, including PDFs, Office attachments and ZIP archives.

If a user’s email triggers one of your DLP rules, they’ll be presented with details of the sensitive content and the detection rules that it triggered. You can set a custom action for each rule, so for some types of data you could require explicit confirmation from the sender, while other content might be completely blocked.

SafeSend also gives you the option of adding X-headers to emails. These can be used to trigger encryption using a separate security product such as Mimecast and Proofpoint – or you can use X-headers in conjunction with Exchange transport rules to verify that users have SafeSend installed. 

We found SafeSend simple to roll out and refreshingly easy to manage. In these days when an accidental data breach can expose you to steep fines, every SMB ought to be concerned about email security – and this add-in is a great solution.