Sage is among the accounting software providers that’s been working with HMRC to ensure that it’s all set up for the introduction of the government’s new Making Tax Digital at the beginning of April.

While most of Sage’s rivals in the world of cloud-based SMB accounting suites have three or more tiers for businesses of different sizes and requirements, Sage keeps it simple with just two core subscription options, both of which allow you give your accountant full access free of charge.

Priced at £10 per month, Sage Accounting Start is designed to handle invoicing, track payments and file VAT returns. It’s a bit of a jump to the full £22 Sage Accounting suite, but for that extra money you get the ability to create quotes and estimates for your customers, record purchase invoices to make it easier to monitor your outgoings and reclaim VAT, and keep on top of your books with a cashflow statement to show what money you have incoming and outgoing.

It’s worth noting that many of these features come as standard in all tiers of some rival accounting suites, such as QuickBooks and Xero, although these have other limitations on their entry-level tiers. In this review, we’ll focus on the full Sage Accounting suite, rather than its cut-down sibling for microbusinesses.

This also includes support for multiple currencies, more than one company, remittance notes and statement overviews for customers. If you need payroll features, including support for pensions and PAYE tax filing, you’ll have to subscribe to Sage Payroll, starting at £6 a month for companies that pay up to 5 employees. A variety of introductory offers and Accounting/Payroll bundles are available.

It’s also worth noting that Sage hosts all UK and European users’ data at Amazon’s Dublin datacentre in Ireland. This is covered by the UK’s decision to regard all EEA member states as meeting adequate data protection requirements, even in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

Sage Accounting review: Setup and configuration

When you sign up, Sage asks you for some basic information about your business, including your contact details, VAT registration status, and whether you’re a sole trader, a partnership, or a limited company.

When you’ve finished creating your account, you’re presented with not just a guided setup wizard, but a whole Getting Started tab, with multiple categories that take you through setting up customers and suppliers, connecting bank accounts and customising the default Chart of Accounts, as well as a number of optional features that depend on your business’s specific needs.

Sage’s first guided setup suggestion is that you create or import some customer profiles – a CSV template is supplied to help you bulk add existing clients. The customer creation tool helpfully allows you to assign a default sales category on your chart of accounts to each customer. We’d have liked more than two address lines available for UK-based clients, though.

The Customers section of Sage also provides an overview of how much each of your clients owes you, and a statement run button to generate payment reminders summarising all invoices currently due from each customer. Rather than importing full details of every existing invoice when you migrate to Sage, you can set opening balances for customers who’re due to pay you.

The guided setup process also advises you to create and set balances for suppliers, view Aged Creditors and Aged Debtors reports to see how much you owe and are owed, add your bank accounts and review the default Chart of Accounts.

An Optional extras section lists a few things that might be helpful to some, but not all, businesses, such as invoice customisation, enabling foreign currency support and creating a list of products or services with fixed charges. Other Summary tabs provide an at-a-glance look at your sales, purchases and cashflow, complete with illustrative graphs – whichever one you last viewed will be open by default next you visit the page.

Sage Accounting review: Banking and reconciliation

The Banking page provides an excellent overview of your finances. Bank accounts can be added manually or via Sage’s searchable online banking connection tool, which supports most of the major UK high street and business banks, but few digital challenger banks – Transferwise, ING and Shine are conspicuous by their absence.

We were pleased by how easy it was to add a bank account manually using either sort code and account number or IBAN and BIC. Although you’re then prompted to connect to it online, you can opt out of that and upload statements instead. If you don’t feel comfortable giving your accounting suite read access to your bank accounts, Sage is definitely a good choice.

Unfortunately, bank accounts in currencies other than GBP are not supported, even though Sage has a multicurrency mode and supports foreign currency transactions using either its own exchange rate or one that you’ve defined yourself based on your financial service provider’s rate and charges.

The banking interface also allows you to reconcile the transactions to your invoices, bills and inter-account transfers. You can create new customer and supplier references as you go, use the Match feature associate them with paperwork that you’ve already logged, and create rules for easier reconciliation in future.

Once you’ve assigned each to your satisfaction, you have to click the Create button to the right of each transaction to complete the process. If you accidentally double-import any transactions, a cross on the left lets you discard them. If you use Sage Payroll, you’ll also need to manually discard staff payment transactions to avoid logging them twice.

Sage Accounting review: Inventory, tax and payroll

Sage includes basic inventory tracking via its Products & Services interface. Here you can create entries for services and items you provide, classified as either Stock, Non-stock or Service. If you want to track quantities of something, class it as Stock and Safe will automatically track how many of the item you have in stock based on your purchase receipts and sales invoices.

The software also helps you calculate and submit your VAT returns to HMRC under the new Making Tax Digital scheme. In the VAT returns section of the Reports menu, you’ll be able to create and automatically calculate your returns based on your invoices filed during the present reporting period. After checking them over, submitting your return is a simple, one-click operation.

Like most accounting packages, Sage charges extra if you need payroll features. Sage Payroll is priced at £6 per month for one to five employees, with other deals to cover more staff. Once you’ve subscribed, you can easily switch between Accounting and Payroll via a pull-down menu at the very top of the screen.

It’s simple to use and clearly documented. Payroll handles PAYE income tax, pension auto-enrolment and deductions such as student loan payments, child support and broader categories that can be used for benefits such as company season ticket loans. It supports multiple weekly and monthly paydays, and includes a relatively painless process for entering the details of existing employees if you’re transferring from existing payroll software. Note that this version of Sage Payroll, aimed at smaller businesses, doesn’t support timesheets.

Sage Accounting review: Payments, apps, and integrations

Sage supports Stripe for on-invoice credit card payments and can also integrate with Sage Pay. Unlike many rivals, there’s no integrated support for PayPal, but if you use the service, it’s easy to add PayPal to your bank feed and simply put a payment link in your invoices and emails.

As you’d expect, there’s a smartphone app for Android and iOS. It looks great and makes it easy to quickly generate quotes, invoices, payments and receipts (complete with a photo), and log bank transfers on the move. You can also add and access contacts and get an at-a-glance view of the current status of your invoices, outgoings and bank accounts.

Unlike like some rival accounting suites, or indeed Sage 50cloud, Sage Accounting doesn’t have a library of modules or extensions to help you connect it to other software you might use. You can link a Google account to automatic export backup copies of invoices and quotes to Google Drive, but that’s about the total extent of Sage Accounting’s integration with non-Sage products.

Sage Accounting review: Interface

Sage has a powerful range of features, and its menu layout and settings are generally clear. However, font sizes on some pages are small, which can be a problem on higher resolution displays.

Almost all pages display a navigation toolbar to move around the Sage interface and a plus sign at the right of the screen makes it easy to rapidly create invoices, enter receipts, create customers and more. But this vanishes in a couple of places. For example, when you finish matching your incoming bank transactions, the only buttons on offer are Import, to bring in more transactions, or Connect Bank. We had to use the Accounting link in the top bar to get back to the Summary page.

We also noticed occasionally inconsistent support for the browser’s back button, which will sometimes send you back multiple pages, rather than to the last screen you were on.

Sage Accounting review: Verdict

Sage has been a dominant force in business accounting for years and, despite some minor user interface quirks, Sage Accounting is very capable. As well as guiding you through everything from invoicing and transaction reconciliation to VAT returns, it has plenty of customisation options for both service and sales-oriented businesses, including basic stock tracking.

Sage Accounting and Payroll lacks a number of features, such as timesheets and project management tools, that we’d either expect to find built-in or available to connect via other services. The lack of support for non-GBP denominated bank accounts is also disappointing.

However, it covers the bases for the majority of businesses, making it a solid choice, if less flexible than rival Quickbooks.

It’s easy to see why RingCentral Office is one of the most popular cloud-hosted VoIP services as it delivers an incredible range of call handling features and an extensive choice of call plans, allowing it to be easily customised to your needs.

Customers can pay monthly while yearly contracts offer a 38% price reduction, and SMEs that want all the bells and whistles will find the Standard plan a good starting point. For a monthly fee of £14.99 per user (paid yearly), you get free monthly outbound calls of 750 minutes per user, 250 minutes of calls to freephone numbers assigned to your account plus call analytics, reporting and RingCentral’s slick multi-level IVR (interactive voice response) feature.

All plans, including the basic Entry version, provide plenty of standard features. These include sending voice messages to email, call recording and RingCentral’s free Glip Windows app for messaging, file sharing, video chat and integration with apps such as Dropbox.

You also get the standard Auto-Receptionist service which was already set up for us and linked to our account’s main number. We could assign it to one extension so callers press ‘0’ to be put through to this, they could enter another extension if known or wait for a list to be presented.

Custom greeting messages are created using the web portal’s recording feature which allows you to use a phone, your PC’s microphone or uploaded WAV and MP3 files. The default message worked fine as RingCentral had already inserted our account company name into the audio message for us.

IVR takes this to the next level, providing a visual editor tool for creating multi-level call handling menus. This allows you to present a highly professional front desk and RingCentral offer plenty of help along with sample XML files to get you started.

Creating users doesn’t get any easier as you can do it manually or import them from Active Directory. If you’ve already created extensions, these can be assigned to new users who receive an email message with a secure link to an express setup web page.

This requires them to enter a strong password and voicemail PIN after which they can customise options such as regional settings and their registered location for emergency calls. From their personal web portal, users can create their own greetings and set up call handling rules for transferring calls to other extensions, a mobile or voicemail.

The wizard also presents a page where users can download free softphones for Windows, Macs, iOS and Android, and RingCentral’s Windows softphone is simply the best. Along with a standard dial-pad, it links up with your voicemail, allows you to send text or faxes and even has a HUD (heads-up display) that shows the status of other users and provides quick contact links.

During user and extension creation you can order Cisco, Polycom and Yealink desk phones from RingCentral or use your own. Our Yealink T23G phones required manual configuration but this didn’t take long as the online help showed their web interface and where SIP account details had to be entered.

Reporting is top-notch: the portal’s analytics page displays graphs of total calls, average call time, inbound and outbound calls plus a breakdown of calls by user. Historical reports are included and the portal even shows call quality and MOS (mean opinion score) graphs and pie charts.

SMEs that want the best cloud VoIP services won’t find a better alternative to RingCentral Office. It’s easy to deploy and manage, call handling features are outstanding and it all comes at a very competitive price.

SMEs that want to host their own IP PBX will love 3CX’s Phone System, as it offers every feature they could possibly need. Furthermore, pricing is based on the number of simultaneous calls and not physical extensions, making it even easier to choose the right license.

3CX also offers a free 16SC version which supports 16 simultaneous calls and includes maintenance for the first year. If you don’t renew the contract after this period, it automatically drops to the 4SC version which includes perpetual updates.

You can host Phone System on a Windows or Linux server, run it on a mini PC, virtualize it on Hyper-V, VMware or KVM hosts or cloud host it with providers such as Amazon Lightsail, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. If you decide to go from on-premises to the cloud, the new PBX Express tool migrates your IP PBX without losing your settings.

For testing, we used an HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen9 rack server equipped with a 3.4GHz Xeon E3-1230 v5 CPU and 16GB of DDR4 – powerful enough to handle 256 simultaneous calls. Software installation is swift and the setup wizard had us up and running in 30 minutes.

We needed to open up SIP and RTP ports on our firewall using port forwarding rules, but 3CX provides detailed online tutorials. On completion, a firewall checker tested all required ports and gave us a green light to continue.

3CX requires an external FQDN (fully qualified domain name) and SSL certificate to ensure remote users can connect securely to the IP PBX. It can provide these services for you and they will still continue to function even if you’re running the free 4SC version.

Just create an extension number for each user; importing them from Active Directory adds details such as email addresses and mobile numbers. 3CX also provides SMTP services and users receive an email with extension details, voice mail access PIN and a download link for the 3CX Windows softphone along with a registration file.

IP phone provisioning is a walk in the park: our Yealink T23G phones appeared in the console as soon as they came online. After assigning them to each user, they were set up automatically and even had their firmware updated to the latest version.

3CX offers a stunning range of call handling features and its smart console provides easy access to them. Inbound rules allowed us to assign our SIP trunk phone number aliases to selected extensions and route them to voicemail or an external number outside of office hours.

Caller ID inbound rules route calls from specific numbers to selected extensions while call queues and ring groups ensure calls are always answered. Outbound rules control all aspects of outgoing calls and for backup, you can assign up to 5 SIP trunks.

A digital receptionist ensures callers go to the correct person by presenting them with custom messages and menu options. Each user can have their calls recorded to the Phone System host as WAV files while hot-desking in the Pro and Enterprise versions allows selected extensions to be shared by multiple users.

Free softphones for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android devices are provided and we registered our iPad by scanning the QR code in our personal web portal. The portal also provided quick access for running web meetings or conferences and accessing call features, chats, contacts and voice mail.

A great combination of call handling features and deployment options makes 3CX’s Phone System the perfect choice for SMEs that want to host their own IP PBX. It’s easy to install and manage and simply won’t be beaten for value.

SMEs worried about cloud file sharing security can rest easy with Tresorit: it delivers total end-to-end encryption. Your data is encrypted client-side, in transit and on Tresorit’s cloud servers and as no encryption keys or passwords are stored anywhere in unencrypted form, only you have access.

We’re reviewing the Tresorit Business plan which costs £8 per user per month if you pay yearly. You can trial the product but Tresorit asks for payment details beforehand, so remember to cancel the trial if you decide not to keep it or you’ll be charged.

The Business plan starts with 1TB of encrypted cloud storage per user and offers a wealth of features including deleted file restoration, unlimited file version recovery, security policies and Outlook integration. It builds on the Small Business plan by adding Active Directory (AD) support, password recovery, custom portal branding and remote wipe for stolen or lost mobile devices.

Deployment is swift; we used the admin cloud portal to send email invitations to users. These contain a download link for the Tresorit desktop app and after installing it, they provide their full name and enter a password.

Central to Tresorit’s service are Tresors which are secure encrypted folders. The desktop app adds a personal Tresor when it first loads and each user can create as many as they want, up to the limit of their personal cloud storage.

The app is easy to use and when creating Tresors, you can add an existing folder where its contents are uploaded and synced with the cloud. If you create a new Tresor, its starts with file syncing turned off which can be enabled with one click when you’re ready.

From the Windows desktop app, we viewed the contents of all our personal Tresors, uploaded more files to them and moved, deleted or renamed individual files. The app also creates a new local drive for quick access to Tresors and each user has their own web portal.

Sharing Tresors and files is easy as you select this option and choose which team members to invite. Once they accept, your Tresor will be shared with them and you can decide whether they are allowed to edit files, add new ones or merely view them.

Tresorit’s Outlook plug-in means never having to send an unencrypted attachment again. You simply select a file or a complete folder and it will upload it, encrypt it and provide a secure link in the message body.

It’s very easy to use – you create a new email, select the ‘Upload and attach’ icon and choose your file or folder. During this phase, you can set a link expiration date, decide how many times it can be opened and password protect it.

The Admin Center portal opens with a dashboard showing a summary of users, storage usage and devices along with graphs of the top 5 users and platforms. The activity chart alongside is basic as it only shows invitations, acceptances plus policy creations and updates.

Security policies are powerful as they can enforce 2-step verification, control which devices are permitted to access the cloud service and apply IP filtering to stop access from specific locations. You can decide whether users may create file links, set login session limits in days, stop browsers from remembering login credentials and deny them personal Tresors.

Tresorit may not be able to match the collaboration features of its competitors but it beats them hands-down for security. Its zero-knowledge encryption makes it very easy to deploy and use, the desktop apps are well designed and Tresorit’s Business plan is an affordable option for SMEs.

It’s almost inevitable that most people will have encountered Dropbox at some stage, as it’s one of the most popular file sharing cloud platforms. For good reason too; Dropbox offers a great set of features with its Business plans adding essential collaboration tools and enhanced security.

We’re reviewing the Business Advanced plan which augments the Standard version with unlimited cloud storage, tiered admin roles and file event tracking. You can sign up for a 5-user, 30-day trial and Dropbox only wants your card details if you decide to keep it.

Adding new members to your team is a breeze as invitations are emailed directly from the admin console. After clicking on the link, users enter their name, choose a password and download the Dropbox app.

The whole process takes 5-6 minutes and each user is provided with a personal Dropbox folder and direct access to all shared folders they have permission to see. If permitted, they can also decide whether to save on hard disk space and have files only available online.

Their local Dropbox folder shows all files stored in the cloud which can then be downloaded for editing. The local option still stores the files in the cloud but also downloads them to their Dropbox folder for instant access.

File sharing features are excellent with the contents of any team folder initially available to all members. You can fine-tune this by deciding who is allowed to access and edit top level team folders and set sharing permissions right down to individual folders and files.

Link settings protect shared folders and files so you can decide who can see them, what editing privileges they have and whether they can post comments. They can be password protected and an expiry date set so the link then becomes unavailable.

Admin tasks can be delegated by adding privileges to selected members. User admins can add and remove team members and groups while support admins handle account password management and deleted file recovery requests.

File requests are a handy feature as you can ask anyone, including those without a Dropbox account, to send you a file. Just create an email request and the recipient chooses a local file and sends it to the Dropbox folder you specified in the request.

Dropbox Paper delivers great online document editing tools. It allows team members to create documents that can be viewed, shared and edited directly from the Dropbox web portal and exported in Word, PDF and Markdown formats.

Dropbox Badge supports Microsoft Office files, allows you to see who else is viewing and editing shared files on their desktop and lets you update your version with any changes they’ve made. It requires the Windows or Mac Dropbox agent loaded and adds an icon at the side of the document window which shows who else is accessing the document.

General access security is tight – admins can enable global password controls and choose the ‘moderate’ or ‘very strong’ setting. Dropbox compares their passwords with a pattern database and will stop weak or easily guessed passwords being used.

You can enable this feature at any time, while regular password changes can be enforced from the admin console with one click. There’s more: the plan also includes two-factor authentication (2FA) which uses unique six-digit security codes, while single sign-on (SSO) allows you to redirect user logins to identity providers that support SAML 2.0.

Businesses that want plenty of cloud collaboration tools and no limits on storage will love Dropbox Business Advanced. File sharing features are beyond reproach, it’s easy to manage and account security doesn’t get much tougher either.

Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor is perfect for SMEs that want to know about everything on their network, as it offers over 250 sensor types. Even better, these are all included as standard so you don’t have to worry about any future costs for optional features.

PRTG’s licensing is based on the number of monitored elements, which can be anything from a CPU core or network switch port to a web URL or Exchange mail queue. The sensor count can get eaten up very quickly on large networks but you can delete those you don’t want so they’re returned to the licensing pool for other devices.

We’ve been running PRTG on a Windows 7 desktop in the lab for over six years, and Paessler’s continuous rollout model has faithfully kept it updated to the latest version. Our host system is fine for monitoring our lab network of up to 50 devices and 500 sensors but for larger networks, Paessler would prefer you to use Windows Server 2012 R2 or later.

New users are guided along with a network discovery wizard which does all the hard work for them. Once it has identified each device, it assigns the most appropriate set of sensors to them along with pre-set threshold triggers so it can start issuing alerts immediately.

PRTG’s web console is a slick affair and its home page provides quick readout graphs showing the status of all sensors and alarms. The latest v18.4 has been updated so that all the status icons next to the donut charts are now active and clicking on one takes you directly to a filtered view.

The console presents a wealth of valuable information with systems neatly organised into hierarchical groupings. You can move systems to other groups as required, where they inherit settings such as discovery schedules and login credentials from the parent group – or they can have their own settings.

It’s easy to pinpoint trouble areas as the colour-coded sensors show clearly whether they are up, down, paused or in a warning state. Hover the mouse over any sensor and it’ll pop up a window with graphs of live data and any relevant warning messages.

PRTG offers ten notification methods including email, SMS, Syslog and Slack. Events can be tied in with actions and the pre-set values provided by the wizard can be changed at any level of the group hierarchy.

Extra sensors can be added to the web console and PRTG scores highly for its cloud service sensors. The price includes ones to monitor Amazon CloudWatch services, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox while the Common SaaS sensor keeps an eye on Office 365, SalesForce and Google Apps.

To help interpret sensor data, PRTG provides pre-set views such as the top ten sensors for uptime, downtime or CPU usage but it’s easy enough to create your own custom dashboards. Paessler also delivers unbeatable mobile support and we used the iOS app on our iPad to remotely access the main PRTG server, view the same content as the web console and receive alerts via push notifications.

The new eHealth sensor even puts hospitals on Paessler’s radar, as it monitors the HL7 (Health Level 7) and DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) protocols. It has no access to patient data and is designed to monitor these systems and provide early warnings of problems.

Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor 18.4 presents a well-designed console that tells you everything you need to know about your network. The huge range of sensors makes it a compelling choice for businesses of all sizes and the all-inclusive price means there are no hidden costs to worry about.

Ipswitch’s WhatsUp Gold (WUG) 2018 takes all the guesswork out of licensing, employing a simple points-based system. Each device, no matter how many network ports, CPUs and so on is considered one element and costs one point, while monitored applications or NetFlow data sources each cost ten points.

WUG 2018 introduces plenty of new features with a sharp focus on the cloud. You can now monitor performance of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services, and Meraki cloud-managed wireless APs.

Licensing has been simplified with new Premium yearly subscriptions or licensed versions providing core features such as discovery, alerting, reporting and wireless, cloud and storage monitoring. The Total Plus version adds monitoring for flows, virtualized environments plus applications, and you can purchase these separately as add-on packs for the Premium versions.

Installation took an hour; the routine downloads the requisite .NET version and SQL Server 2014 Express, installs IIS if it isn’t already present and then loads all the WUG services. It gets a lot quicker from here on – the freshly designed web interface loads a discovery wizard which only took eight minutes to scan the lab’s IP subnet.

For more network insight, we created custom scans with additional device and cloud service credentials and scheduled them to run every day. The My Network tab neatly displayed all our discovered devices accompanied by colour-coded icons showing their status.

Devices are automatically placed in dynamic groups where, for example, all our Synology NAS appliances were dropped into the default Storage group for quick access. You can create custom dynamic groups with the builder tool and apply WUG rules to fine-tune membership, with criteria such as device status, properties and configurations.

The My Network workspace provides an interactive map and its overlay feature adds display options such as connection links and their status along with device dependencies. New overlays are now provided for wireless networks, virtualization hosts and devices hosting apps being monitored by the application performance monitor (APM) add-on.

APM can keep a watchful eye on many business apps including Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle and Active Directory. It’s easy to configure: we selected app categories and left APM to scan monitored devices and find them for us, after which we used profiles to monitor critical functions and assign alerts and actions.

You can now choose from no less than 23 actions, with the standard options of email, SMS, sounds and scripts enhanced with support for the Slack, IFTTT (If This Then That), ServiceNow and OpsGenie services. Policies link alerts with actions and WUG provides a policy builder tool to link them with state changes of selected monitored devices.

One complaint we still have is WUG’s lack of mobile apps. Ipswitch keeps promising these and with each successive year, they never materialise.

The Virtualization Monitoring pack has been improved as along with VMware, WUG 2018 discovers Hyper-V hosts and can now list all their VMs. From the Analyze Virtual Monitoring tab, we could view plenty of information about running VMs and their host resource utilization.

The console’s Analyze tab puts all monitoring features at your fingertips with the home page providing a graphical overview of all devices in alert states. From its drop-down menu, we could swiftly pull up views of the Top 10 busiest devices, alert summaries and dashboards for the APM and virtual host add-ons.

WhatsUpGold 2018 adds some valuable new features including improved cloud monitoring and Hyper-V support. It can’t match ManageEngine’s OpManager for value but it does offer an excellent range of monitoring features while its ease of use will appeal to SMBs.

ManageEngine’s OpManager has gone through a number of transformations over the past two years and the latest edition, v12.3, delivers even more new features. Its revamped web console makes problem detection and troubleshooting even easier, it has over 39,000 vendor templates for accurate device identification and virtual host support now includes Citrix XenServer.

Licensing doesn’t get any simpler: it’s based purely on monitored devices, regardless of the number of interfaces, sensors or elements each one has. The Essentials version is great value too, with prices starting at only £1,850 for a 50 device license pack.

OpManager also stands out for its advanced virtualization monitoring. A standard license includes VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer support – something many other vendors only offer as an optional, paid-for feature.

OpManager’s light touch on its host system also gets our vote. We downloaded the small 135MB executable, installed it in 15 minutes on our Windows Server 2012 R2 host and watched it load a single Windows service and default PostgreSQL database.

Discovery doesn’t take long either with the wizard-driven routine asking for IP address ranges, sets of device credentials and schedule details. Our discovery profile took 7 minutes to scan the lab network and we could see a list of all discovered devices from the Inventory tab. OpManager offers accurate identification; it correctly spotted our HPE network switches, Windows 10 desktops, Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V hosts, printers and NAS appliances.

The new console sees all menu options moved to the top with a ribbon bar providing easy access to features such as dashboards, device inventories, alarms and maps. Existing users will like the option to switch the page layout back to the previous version, which has a menu bar down the side and network summary across the top.

The enterprise dashboard provides a widget-based overview of device availability, alarms, the busiest devices and an infrastructure snapshot showing a list of device categories. The new design supports drag-and-drop customisation and although you can’t remove any widgets from the default views, you can create your own dashboards.

The heat-map widget is a must-have feature in any dashboard, as it presents a grid of coloured blocks representing each device, their status and quick links to each one. Another valuable feature is the NOC (Network Operations Center) views where you can select dashboards and present them on a big screen for your support department.

OpManager provided plenty of virtualization details with a summary dashboard, separate ones for Hyper-V, VMware and XenServer plus another showing VM sprawl. For our Hyper-V host, we viewed a page showing VMs using the most host resources with separate tables for CPU, memory, storage and network utilization.

Workflows automate responses to events or errors and associate sequences of conditions and actions. These are simple to create using the Workflow Builder, where you drag and drop conditions and actions into its central pane and apply them to selected devices.

The optional Application Performance Management (APM) add-in snaps neatly into the OpManager console and provides in-depth details on a huge range of applications, databases and cloud services. The Storage add-on is less appealing as many of the RAID, FC switch and tape library devices listed as supported are obsolete.

OpManager’s new iOS app delivers monitoring on the move. With it loaded on our iPad, we logged into the OpManager host and viewed our custom dashboards, all monitored devices, alarms and the APM module.

This latest version of OpManager delivers a wealth of new features and remedies most of its predecessor’s shortcomings. It’s swift to deploy, includes integral virtualization monitoring tools and looks great value for SMBs.

Time-poor SMBs will love SolarWinds’ Network Performance Monitor (NPM) as it puts everything they need to know about network health right at their fingertips. It delivers an impressive range of network monitoring tools, all neatly integrated into SolarWinds’ Orion unified web console which can be customised to show all problem areas at a glance.

The main update in NPM 12.4 targets enterprises, as it now monitors Cisco’s software defined networks (SDNs). NPM receives a few network performance tweaks while the Orion web server centrally upgrades all polling engines and supports secure logins via SAML v2 providers.

Licensing is a little confusing as it’s based on elements, which can be monitored nodes, interfaces or logical disk volumes. We’ve shown the price of an SL100 license which enables 100 of each type and if any one element type goes over this threshold, you can either delete those you don’t require, or upgrade to the next level of license.

Installation on a Windows Server 2016 host took 90 minutes due to the new online installer downloading all the latest components. Next, a discovery wizard asked for address ranges, subnets plus credentials and 15 minutes later, furnished us with details of every SNMP- and WMI-enabled device on the lab network.

It creates a base set of alerts and thresholds for every monitored resource and you can customise these to link specific alerts with a wide range of actions. If a critical system or service goes offline, you can trigger actions such as sending messages by SMS, email and Syslog or running a program or script.

The NPM web console provides a menu bar across the top for one-click access to dashboards, alerts, reports and settings. Its summary page presents a complete rundown on network activity while colour-coded icons highlight all detected problems.

The console and all device views can be easily customised using the Pencil tool. We added new columns, resized them to fit, moved resource views around to suit and chose from a range of snazzy speedo dials to show items such as CPU utilization.

NPM goes way beyond simple network monitoring though; its Quality of Experience (QoE) feature keeps you in the loop about application activity and can now identify over 1,500 apps. One sensor license is included in the price and with this loaded on our NPM host, we chose which apps to monitor and viewed traffic volume and response time graphs along with pie charts showing business, social and potentially risky activities.

We run both VMware and Hyper-V hosts in the lab and although NPM correctly identified them, it only provided basic availability polling. To get more detail such as datastore usage, VM host resource utilization and capacity planning reports, you need the optional Virtualization Manager (VMAN) which snaps neatly into the Orion web console.

More complex network problems can be solved with NPM’s PerfStack which uses correlation projects to compare ranges of metrics from different nodes. Choose your nodes, drag selected metrics into the project and use the Performance Analysis dashboard to pinpoint exactly what the cause is.

Windows and Linux remote agents can securely monitor cloud servers or you can use Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure APIs which won’t consume any element licenses. Cloud services can also be closely monitored as NPM’s NetPath probes external locations or web sites and provides hop-by-hop maps with latency and packet loss details for each step.

SolarWinds NPM is one of the most sophisticated network monitoring products on the market and a great choice for SMBs. It neatly amalgamates a wealth of tools into a single intuitive console and takes all the guesswork out of troubleshooting network issues

1&1 Internet has decided the time is right to provide its own hosted file sharing service and gets the ball rolling with a tempting proposition. The HiDrive Business plan on review starts at only £10 per month for a one year contract and supports five users, plus a total of 1TB of shared cloud storage.

Deployment is swift, as the HiDrive account holder has admin privileges for adding team members from the cloud portal. From the My Team page, you can invite new users by entering their email address and deciding whether to dish out admin privileges and access to shared resources.

The WebDAV protocol is enabled for each user so they can mount their HiDrive cloud storage as a network drive. You’ll need this for macOS and Linux clients as although they can use their personal web portal to access files, HiDrive doesn’t provide desktop apps for these operating systems.

The Windows app handles real-time syncing and provides right-click menu options to open your HiDrive folder in Explorer. However, the app’s web portal link only takes you to the main 1&1 web site where you have to login again, while its help link directs you to a non-existent web page.

Every user gets a public folder and if they choose to sync this, it becomes available to other team members that have this option enabled. This makes a great general shared repository as any user can drop files into it from their desktop or cloud portal and make them instantly available to the whole team.

You can control access to the public folder for selected users from the admin portal. Their profiles can be edited to block access to this folder or you can permit read-only or read/write access.

The desktop app can sort out WebDAV mappings for you. From the HiDrive Drive panel in the app settings, just choose a drive letter, enter your account password and it’ll map a new drive with direct access to the public folder and your personal cloud storage.

Folders and files can be securely sent to anyone by selecting them from the portal or Windows Explorer and entering an email address in the pop-up window. Password protection, download limits and expiry dates can be applied to the link but the basic spelling mistake in the pre-configured email message body won’t impress potential clients.

The same process is used to invite recipients without a HiDrive account to upload files to your share. This time, you enable write access prior to sending the email and at any time, you can revoke the folder share.
A right-click save feature in Windows Explorer allows selected local folders to be copied over to your cloud storage. These initially appear in the user’s personal cloud folder and can be moved to the public folder if required.

HiDrive provides a simple backup service where you can create a schedule from the admin portal that secures all your team’s cloud data. You can run backups as often as every four hours, retain them for up to a year and restore selected backups as copies.

If you want to run HiDrive backups directly from the desktop app or iOS and Android mobile devices, you must upgrade to the Pro version. You can backup NAS appliances to the cloud but you’ll also need the protocol pack upgrade which adds CIFS/SMB, Rsync and SFTP/FTP support.

HiDrive Business is a simple cloud syncing and sharing option well suited to small businesses but 1&1’s lack of attention to detail doesn’t inspire confidence. The poor online help and sloppy presentation takes the shine off what is arguably an affordable solution.