​In our new world of remote working, being able to effectively support your employees is more important than ever. LogMeIn’s GoToAssist Remote Support is a well established cloud-hosted support service, and this latest update adds flexibility by allowing technicians to launch remote-access sessions from their personal web portal or a dedicated desktop application.

Whichever method you choose, it’s easy to set up an on-demand connection. With a few clicks you can generate a nine-digit access code and a web link, which can be sent directly to the client via email or SMS. The end user can then either click on the link or manually open the website and enter the code to initiate the session.

A few security measures help prevent unauthorised access. Before remote control is granted, the user is shown a web page displaying details of the person requesting the session; they must also manually download the temporary agent and explicitly permit remote access. While the session is running, either party can click the disconnection button to instantly end the session – and afterwards the agent immediately unloads itself, so there’s no opportunity for hackers to probe it.

From the technician’s side, the web portal and desktop app are effectively identical, with an upper menu providing an extensive range of support tools. You’ll find options to reboot and reconnect, send files to the client, browse their storage devices and transfer the session to another technician. Technicians can share their own screens too, via a browser console on the remote system, and for general troubleshooting there’s a handy information button, which shows a snapshot of the client system’s CPU usage, memory and running processes. 

The major difference between the web and app interfaces emerges when multiple support sessions are open together. In the application, a sidebar appears showing thumbnail views, so you can keep an eye on what’s going on and quickly swap between systems. If you’re using the web portal, you can still manage multiple sessions, but each one opens in its own web page.

Unattended access can be set up in two ways. If you’re already inside an on-demand session then you just have to click the “Add Device” button on the toolbar; this pops up a request on the remote system asking permission to install a permanent agent, and the technician’s remote control is temporarily suspended, so only the user can approve this. We tried this process on Windows and macOS and found it seamless on both. Alternatively, you can download the permanent agent from the web console and send it to the client for manual installation. 

Mobile support is mixed. An Android agent is in the works, but it’s currently in beta and officially only works on Samsung and LG mobiles. On iOS, meanwhile, the technician app only supports GoToAssist v4, and any unattended systems set up from v5 won’t show in its console. You can still open the web portal in Safari, however, and use that to create on-demand sessions or access unattended systems.

It’s also worth noting that support for Android and iOS client devices is an add-on, costing £12 per month for each technician. We tested it on an iPad with the GoToAssist Customer v5 app loaded and had no problems remotely viewing its screen from the desktop console and web portal.

Mobile camera sharing is another handy tool, giving users an easy way to show technicians what they can see, and enabling voice conversations too. These connections work similarly to regular support sessions, but use a separate URL and require their own security code.

LogMeIn’s GoToAssist Remote Support 5 is easy to use and affordable, as subscriptions are based on the number of technicians with no limits on simultaneous sessions. The iOS technician app needs an update, but overall this is a great support package that makes a good fit for most SMBs.

​

​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.

Lastpass hasn’t earned itself many supporters recently, and Bitwarden is coming for its password management crown with a massively feature-packed, cross-platform free consumer tier. It’s also almost unique in having a free business tier which, while limited to two users, is an obvious choice for micro-businesses and partnerships. The main drawback is that it has more limited 2FA options and lacks support for advanced features such as attaching encrypted files to entries and password vault health reports.

Bitwarden Teams expands on this free two-person tier, with an API for easy automation, event logs, user groups, a directory connector to automatically manage users when they’re added to your corporate LDAP server, extra two-factor authentication options, password vault health analysis, and the ability to grant emergency access rights to trusted users.

For larger businesses, Bitwarden Enterprise is very competitively priced, supports SSO and granular policy control, has the transparency benefit of open-source code and the convenience of a fully managed service. It’s also priced comparably to the mid- or entry-level tiers of many rivals, and if you want, you can even self-host it on your own servers with no additional licensing. 

Bitwarden review: Client features

The web-based incarnation of Bitwarden’s vault and settings are more functional than beautiful. Everything’s pretty easy to find, although we’d have liked download links to the critical Bitwarden apps to be more clearly signposted. You’ll find them on the pull-down from your profile icon at the top right, and at https://bitwarden.com/download/.

Dedicated desktop apps are available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Mobile apps cater to iOS and Android, with the open source F-Droid store hosting a copy for de-Googleised Android devices. An extensive range of browsers are covered, including Firefox, Safari, Chrome and browsers that share their rendering engines, even with the unusual addition of Tor Browser.

Bitwarden’s command line tool (which primarily exists to make automation easier) is available for bash and PowerShell, and can be found via a number of package managers including NPM – the recommended install path if you’re already using node.js – Homebrew, Chocolatey and Snap.

The client is eminently easy to use and does exactly what you’d expect from a password manager. Corporate users of Bitwarden get a free personal account, which they’ll log into to access their corporate password collection. When they save a password, they’ll be prompted to choose whether it belongs to their personal account or in the business’. Business passwords have to be in a collection, and the collections that each user is given access show up in their clients and online vault.

The Google Play Store version of Bitwarden’s Android client was recently found to include two trackers, which the company has convincingly justified as required for push notifications and crash reporting; if you’d rather avoid them, they are not included in the version distributed on F-Droid.

Bitwarden review: Management features

Users can be invited with standard, limited privileges to access items in collections that have been assigned to them and, if they are given write access, to add, edit and delete passwords and secure notes from those collections.

Managers have the power to assign users and groups to collections, as well as to create and delete said collections. Admins can create and assign users to user groups, invite new users, manage policies, check event logs and export the organisation’s vault data en masse, making this a role of trusted authority.

Only the owners can control billing, subscriptions and integrations for third-party applications and services. However, custom roles can also be created, providing granular control over exactly who gets to do what. Additional permissions are available to Enterprise admins via the Bitwarden Business portal.

We’re not too keen on this division between the main management interface and this dedicated portal for making policies and SSO. It’s easy to use, and we like the addition of features such as the ability to deny personal password ownership for organisation users and mandate specific security and password options. However, there aren’t quite as many settings here as you’ll find in comparable services from Dashlane, Keeper, and LastPass, and relatively few options are spread across rather too many pages.

Bitwarden review: Verdict

Bitwarden’s Free Organization tier has limited features, but is entirely free. For those who need more than two users and two collections, Bitwarden Teams costs $36 per user, per year or $4 per user, per month and the Enterprise tier costs $60 per user, per year or $6 per user, per month if you don’t want to commit to a full year.

This puts it among the cheapest business password management services around, and the Enterprise tier, with its fine-grained policy control, would benefit businesses of almost any size, even if they don’t need SSO. Furthermore, Bitwarden’s transparent, audited, zero-knowledge approach to security is solid and thoroughly documented.

Although its admin interface isn’t the most polished around, Bitwarden’s excellent feature set and well-designed range of cross-platform clients, as well as its low prices, make it our favourite business password management service. 

​Acronis takes a broad view to data protection: its Cyber Protect software doesn’t just take care of backup, but adds a heap of AI-driven cybersecurity measures, including malware protection, vulnerability assessments, patch management, hard disk health monitoring and remote desktop services.

Both local and cloud management options are provided; we went for the latter, as it gives you the ability to extend protection to home workers. There are also Essentials, Standard and Advanced editions, with the top-tier package including shared protection plans, deduplication, backup fingerprinting and backup malware scans. Check out Acronis’ website for a full breakdown of the differences between the various versions. 

Whichever permutation you opt for, all versions are subscription only. The Advanced licence includes protection for one physical or virtual server and 250GB of cloud storage for £458 per year; further 1TB chunks are £379 per year, while cloud seeding incurs a one-time fee of £59.

As for self-hosted backups, there’s plenty of flexibility. Supported destinations include SMB and NFS shares, IP SANs and tape drives, and Acronis also offers its own storage node service with deduplication.

For management, the web-based dashboard offers a wealth of information about your protected systems and backup repository status, along with details of any malware detections, blocked URLs, missing patches and more. It’s customisable too, allowing you to personalise and reorganise widgets to focus on whatever’s most important to you.

The only clunky aspect of the cloud-based approach is agent deployment; the client software has to be downloaded from the portal and manually installed, which might not be ideal for full-time home workers. It’s not complicated, though, and you can check the Devices page in the console to confirm that all computers have been successfully registered.

There’s also an agent specifically for Hyper-V systems, while for VMware you can download an agent VM and configure it with your cloud credentials and vCenter server details. Once we’d deployed these agents, the portal happily presented a list of all their VMs available for backup.

Cloud storage is automatically assigned to your account, and for local backups we were easily able to point the software to shares on remote Synology and Qnap NAS appliances using their UNC paths.

The specifics of your backups are configured in the form of plans, which define items to be copied, security settings, schedules and storage devices. A plan can be associated with any number of devices; a clever data protection map exposes files not covered by a backup plan, while plans created at the virtual host level will helpfully take in any new VMs as they’re added. Configuring hybrid backups is as easy as specifying two destinations in your plan, so each run backs up to both on-premises storage and the cloud repository. Malware scanning can be included in your plan too, along with URL filtering (using a predefined list of 44 categories), vulnerability assessments and other security checks. 

Acronis also shines when it’s time for recovery. Regular system backups can be easily mounted as virtual machines, so you can browse and pick out individual files or folders for restoration. Backed-up VMs can be restored to their original location, either as a new VM on the same host or to another location. It’s fast, too, which is great news for your RTOs: we restored an entire Windows Server 2019 VM back to our vSphere host in just 100 seconds.

Acronis Cyber Protect is a great all-round data protection solution, thanks to its smart combination of cybersecurity measures and cloud-managed backup. The portal is well designed too, making it easy to create and manage hybrid backup strategies, and the protection for virtualised environments is first class.

​

Since its launch in 2016, Workplace has aimed to bring the powerful tools and addictive user experience of Facebook to corporate environments, with the intention of improving staff engagement and communication.

Remote working was already on the rise when COVID struck, but the ongoing health crisis has made it a priority for every job that can be done remotely to be made as accessible as possible for people working from home.

To this end, Slack – now owned by Salesforce – and Microsoft’s rival Teams have been providing vital communication between now-remote colleagues, alongside video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Google Meet.

Workplace includes unified communications, with voice, video and text chat. However, it adds a lot more: personal blogs, events, and both formal and informal groups for staff. Its knowledge management features make a compelling alternative to an office intranet, and there’s polling and checklists for rudimentary project tracking in there, too. 

It really is a corporate version of Facebook – for better and for worse.

Facebook Workplace review: User experience

Workplace looks and feels a lot like Facebook. Whether that’s a user experience advantage or not may depend on whether your company’s staff actually use or care for Facebook, but either way, the user interface is undeniably clear and easy to navigate. 

Its desktop browser interface tiles neatly on higher resolution monitors, but is most comfortable occupying the entire screen on resolutions of 1920×1080 or less. You can enable dark mode via a menu accessible from your profile icon at bottom left, which is very easy on the eyes if you’ve been staring at a screen all day.

The interface is split into a large content pane on the right, a narrower tabbed index to its left and, at the far left, a narrow icon pane that allows you to switch between your home view, notifications, chat and, if you have access, the Workplace admin panel.

The Home screen opens on your News Feed, which behaves much as it does in the traditional version of Facebook: you can share posts, videos or images to your timeline, and see posts from the colleagues and groups you follow. 

When you create a post, Workplace prompts you, uninspiringly, with a line asking “What are you working on?”. You can @mention others, use emoji, start live video streams, and share location check-ins, images, animated gifs and pre-recorded H.264/AAC videos up to to 720p.

There are plenty of formatting options available for posts, including markdown support, lists and code blocks. Posts can also be scheduled in advance, so you don’t have to let the entire company know that you’re still working at 2AM.

Live video streaming – not to be confused with video chat – supports your average smartphone or USB camera, external hardware encoders, and software such as Xsplit, Wirecast and OBS. An excellent addition is support for Real-Time Messaging Protocol over SSL (RTMPS) to help secure your content, although you’ll have to ensure that any external encoder you use supports this if you want to stream from it.

Facebook Workplace review: Knowledge management

So far, so Facebook. Next down on the Home navigation column is the Knowledge Library. This is a genuinely useful addition, allowing you to create neatly formatted documents in a tree structure, with a powerful search feature that brings to mind Atalassian’s Confluence.

Workplace suggests using this for corporate handbooks and policy documents. It’s also useful for sharing style guides, documentation and even code and scripting examples, although the otherwise generous formatting options unfortunately lack code blocks or markdown support. 

You can attach files of up to 50MB to your Knowledge documents, but file type support is somewhat limited, so we couldn’t attach a DLL that went with a chunk of our documentation until we compressed it. Once shared, users can discuss the documents via comments, and edit them if they have appropriate privileges.

It could be a little easier to publish Knowledge Library files – inviting people to view a parent file in a tree doesn’t automatically share its children with them, for example – but the system is nonetheless outstandingly useful and feels more elegant and streamlined than similar features other hybrid project/comms solutions such as Basecamp.

Facebook Workplace review: Keeping in contact

Groups work much as their Facebook counterparts. They’re ideal for individual project teams and workgroups, but also for company-wide pet photo sharing and sign-ups for the next virtual pub quiz. You get a few extra posting features in these, including the ability to create events, video chatrooms, shared documents, polls, checklists of actionable items, and Q&A sessions.

The final entry on the Home navigation pane is People, which is populated with links to the colleagues you interact with most often – this opens on a chat window, but you can also get to their profiles, ‘about’ pages and various other content they’ve created or interacted with via a shortcut bar. An Add People button allows you to invite others from either inside or outside your company’s verified domain.

A directory allows you to browse everyone in the company Workplace, while an Events tab lets you schedule private or company-wide events as you please, with associated discussion pages. Oddly, this doesn’t include the ability to schedule a video conference in advance.

You can save a range of posts and other content via the three-dot menu you’ll find at the top right of most content, and these can all be found in your Saved tab, although you can’t save content from the Knowledge Library to these bookmarks.

Facebook Workplace review: Notes, Notifications, and Navigation

Notes, like the corresponding section of the core Facebook product, houses your own private drafts and public notes; these are for individual staff members’ personal use, while the Knowledge Library is designed to be a more general reference for all employees or team members. 

The Follow Coworkers tab, meanwhile, allows you to see all your colleagues and quickly subscribe to their feeds – they aren’t notified when you follow or unfollow them, which is a nice touch. Finally an org chart can be used to illustrate the company’s departmental and managerial relationships.

Below that, you’ll find sections listing the groups and people you interact with most frequently.

A cluster of extra icons at the top of the furthest-left navigation pane provide quick access to a few more helpful features. Notifications are pretty self-explanatory, covering both updates from your colleagues and changes to Workplace itself. As a product under active development, you’ll see the latter with some regularity.

In one such recent change, Group notifications default to selected highlights, and you have to manually opt in if you wish to be notified about all posts from a group. That’s fine for your company pet appreciation group, but less than ideal for key main project groups, so keep an eye on those notification settings.

The Chat tab lists every group and private chat you’re in and is Workplace’s Messenger-inspired communication solution to compete with Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Administrators get an extra settings icon below this, and at the very bottom, everyone gets a trio of icons. These let you provide feedback to Workplace itself, get help and – via your own user icon at bottom left – set your status, enable Do Not Disturb mode, check your activity, and access your account settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Unified communications

While it’s widely regarded as an alternative to Slack or Teams, Workplace’s core communications features aren’t exactly peerless. Video chats are limited to 50 people – fewer even than the free tier of Google Meet. Video quality of the calling system (which is forked from WebRTC with a few enhancements) isn’t bad, though, so you’re well sorted for sensibly-sized meetings.

Group calls are supported under Firefox, Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, notably Edge and Opera. However, Linux users may experience issues when using Firefox, and should use Chromium instead.

There’s also a desktop video chat app for Windows and MacOS. You can create new video chatrooms from either the news feed or the chat pane, but not from events. Events also don’t get associated chatrooms. However, the Workplace team is currently working on ways to integrate live video streams into events more fully.

Each group can have its own chatroom too, and you can see an overview of them all via your Chat tab, but we missed the compact layout we’ve become accustomed to in rivals such as Slack. Your entire chat history and individuals’ profiles are both searchable, and #topics are supported to help keep things on track. However, although you can directly reply to chat messages, there’s no reply threading, which, as with Discord, can make busy rooms feel cluttered.

You can’t adjust how much space your central chat window takes up relative to the channel list and right-hand About sidebar, either. The general layout feels a great deal like Facebook Messenger, and that doesn’t translate entirely well to a business tool, although the mobile app is rather more streamlined.

Facebook Workplace review: Quality of life

Workplace’s default notification settings mean that you’ll get a lot of email: every time someone adds you to a group, every time you’re mentioned or interacted with, and to keep you up to date with a significant chunk of the activity in your groups. This is one of those rare cases where most people will be best off disabling emails and enabling in-browser or on-device push notifications via their Workplace account settings.

You can’t block messages from anyone inside your organisation, but you can block people from outside it who’ve been invited to participate in a shared multi-company chat. You can, however, block specific co-workers from inviting you to events via the settings pages.

You can also limit who can see your posts, hide comments containing certain words and review both posts that tag you and tags added to your posts before they appear on your profile. There’s a highly customisable Do Not Disturb mode, too, supporting both one-off and scheduled settings.

If you’re a member of multiple Workplaces, you can switch between them via the bottom-left personal menu options; this is less convenient than Slack’s implementation, but works well enough given that Workplace has a larger and more feature-packed interface.

Workplace supports ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ pronouns, configurable alongside your name in general settings. It also has none of Facebook’s weird name restrictions, and use of Workplace is entirely unrelated to the possession or status of a standard Facebook account. Two-factor authentication is supported via the security settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Administration

The Administration panel is hugely comprehensive and not actually as overwhelming as it might appear at first glance. You get a lot of data about what your company’s staff are up to, with features such as a security panel tracking password use, malware and poorly secured accounts. If you’ve got an ultra widescreen monitor, enabling full width mode makes this a lot easier to parse at a glance.

You get very granular control over rights and access privileges, as well as over company roles and the content in your Workplace. Administrators can highlight posts as important, group them together in campaigns and send out surveys.

A couple of more unusual features are worthy of note: you can add staff members to a frontline workers group. This is intended for deskless workings, including non-office and even casual staff, such as cashiers, field engineers, warehouse workers and delivery personnel. 

These accounts can be claimed by the worker using a code, rather than via email, and are mobile-first, rather than hinging on the desktop interface. The mobile app provides quick access to the same content as the desktop version, and enables front-line staff to quickly communicate with each other and with their managers, regardless of where they are, as well as providing easy access to knowledge documents. Extra restrictions can be applied to staff in the frontline set, such as barring them from creating Workplace groups.

There’s also less practical stuff, like badges – while it’s useful to know who the fire wardens are and who’s new to the business, awards for effort, helpfulness and participation feel like shiny, patronising trinkets of no real value, and might not be as popular with workers as Workplace seems to expect.

As you’d hope, you can connect Workplace to other cloud services, including Sharepoint, Google Drive and OneDrive, but not the broader features of Office 365 or Google Workspace. Its reasonably comprehensive library of integrations also includes Zoom, BlueJeans and WebEx video conferencing, Jira and Salesforce, but there’s no support for anything that competes with Workplace’s core communication features, such as Slack or Teams.

Facebook Workplace review: Pricing

Workplace has two subscription tiers: Advanced, priced at an extremely competitive $4 per user, per month, and Enterprise, which costs $8 per user, per month. Charities, educational establishments, and some other non-profit organisations may be eligible for a free tier via the Workplace for Good scheme.

Enterprise gives you unlimited storage, compared to 1GB per user for the Advanced subscription, as well as faster and more comprehensive support, with a dedicated team and 4-hour initial response time, compared to Advanced users’ 24-hour potential delay. Enterprise subscribers also get early access to new features and an enhanced peer-to-peer version of the Enterprise Live video streaming system.

Advanced is marketed at small businesses or teams within larger companies, while Enterprise (unsurprisingly) targets large enterprises, but there’s not a great deal to choose between them.

Facebook Workplace review: Verdict

On paper, Workplace is a slightly perplexing attempt to bring social media style interaction to a business environment. In practice, though, you get a competitively-priced hybrid solution with elements of chat and video communication, blogging and vlogging, knowledge management and even lightweight project management capabilities. That’s a lot of functionality – even if some of it is questionably useful.

The Knowledge Library, support for extended posts, and community tools are things we’d like to see more of in business communications platforms, particularly as many of us are settling in for the long haul when it comes to remote working.

However, Workplace isn’t as on point when it comes to its core unified communications, with chat that feels slightly clunky, lack of automatic video and chatrooms for events, and video conferencing tools hampered by some irritating limitations. That’s something we hope to see improve, because Workplace’s focus on building a sense of community among colleagues is a useful take on internal business communications.

When it comes to cloud backup, it doesn’t get much easier than Backblaze. There are only three buttons, and you needn’t touch any of them: it comes configured to scan your system for personal files, no matter where they’re located on your network, and automatically upload them to Backblaze’s servers. Continual updates occur whenever you make a change or create a new document. For most people, that’s ample protection with zero configuration.

Of course, if you want to get your hands dirty, there are a few things you can customise. Specific file types, locations and drives can be included and excluded – you’re even able to back up external drives – and you can optionally switch from continuous operation to daily or on-demand backups. And if you don’t trust the automatic encryption, you can also set your own encryption key.

For the most part, though, you shouldn’t need to interact with Backblaze until it’s time to restore a backed-up item. Even then, the client stays in the background because your uploaded files are browsed and downloaded from the publisher’s website. Here you can also rescue lost or overwritten files from the past 30 days, and if one of your computers is stolen, you can bring up a map showing where it was when the Backblaze software last touched base.

On that note, be aware that your subscription only entitles you to back up a single PC or Mac. That’s a necessary restriction: each account comes with unlimited storage to ensure that even the biggest files get protected. And remember that if you work with big video files or the like, they will inevitably take a while to reach Backblaze’s servers. Our 2GB folder took 49mins 35secs to upload. That’s a step up from some of the most sluggish options we’ve seen, but it’s still a drag if you want to back up your day’s work before leaving the office.

The final thing to be clear about is that Backblaze is very much a single-purpose tool: it doesn’t handle local backups at all, nor can it create an image of your hard disk for disaster-recovery purposes. That means it’s only one component in a backup strategy, rather than a complete solution – but as cloud components go, it’s terrifically convenient and effective. 

​If file sharing security and privacy are major concerns, you’ve come to the right place: Tresorit delivers total end-to-end encryption. Its zero-knowledge policy means all data is encrypted client-side, in transit, and on Tresorit’s cloud servers, with no encryption keys or passwords stored anywhere in unencrypted form, meaning that only you have access.

Tresorit offers a wide choice of plans for individuals and businesses, and we tried out the Business Plus plan which costs £13 per user per month if paid yearly. This is a great choice if you’re sharing very large files as the maximum single file size is 15GB, and although you don’t get the unlimited cloud storage offered by some competitors, 2TB per user should be enough for most SMBs.

The Business Plus plan brings a lot more into play as along with file sharing, syncing, user and group management plus Outlook integration, it enables custom portal branding, access audit logs, and an unlimited file version history. Businesses that need to keep their data in one country for compliance reasons can also choose from 11 global data centre locations.

Deployment is undemanding as invitations are mailed out from the Admin Center cloud portal and when a user clicks on the link, they can create an account and choose a password. Obviously, users shouldn’t forget this but, with the Advanced Control option enabled in the portal, administrators can perform password resets.

Users are also invited to download the desktop app which, on completion, will create a personal ‘Tresor’ – Tresorit’s name for a secure, encrypted folder. They can add an unlimited number of Tresors up to their storage limit and for swift access, the desktop app creates a Windows Explorer drive mapping or a Finder favorites folder for macOS.

Tresors can be shared by selecting team members from the desktop app contact list and deciding whether they can manage, edit or view them. These functions are also available from the user’s personal web portal which now allows multiple folders to be selected and offers previews of Office documents and PDFs.

There are plenty of ways to securely share files with outside partners and contractors that don’t have a Tresorit account. From the desktop app, you can create a web link or send them directly from any installed email app with the Outlook plug-in adding extra controls such as link expiry dates, download limits, password protection, access logging, and a requirement for recipients to verify their email addresses.

You can also use Tresorit on the move, as the iOS and Android mobile apps provide many of the features in the desktop app. We loved their built-in scanning functions; we used an iPad to take photos of documents, scan them as JPEGs or PDFs, encrypt them, and send them straight to a selected cloud folder.

Tresorit clearly takes security very seriously, and policies created in the Admin Center portal control everything users are allowed to do. These determine what devices they can access their account from, you can stop browsers from storing their login details and apply IP filtering to block access from specific locations.

You can choose which users are allowed to create file links, set login session limits in days, deny them personal Tresors and disable downloads so users can only view files in shared links. Policies can enforce 2-step verification and Tresorit has now added support for SSO (single sign-on) authentication using Azure Active Directory and Okta.

Tresorit may be a little light on collaboration tools but it’s very heavy on security. Affordable and easy to deploy, it’s an ideal choice for SMBs sharing sensitive and confidential information.

Basecamp is a web-based business collaboration, project management, and communication platform that allows you to create dedicated workspaces for your business’s teams and projects. Unlike many online collaboration tools, the subscription includes an unlimited number of users.

It also does a lot of hand-holding when you create your account, prompting you to create projects and add colleagues, before presenting its core layout in a video and giving you some sample teams and projects to play with.

You’re also guided through creating welcome messages and check-in questions for your colleagues, with pre-drafted introductions to the system that come in handy if your creativity is running low.

Basecamp is keen to introduce you to its systems through the medium of video and interaction, but there’s also an extensive manual and guide series for the latest Basecamp 3 system, making it easy to distinguish current documentation from that for previous incarnations of the platform.

It’s a fundamentally simple system. There are three categories that you can add colleagues to. HQ is for company-wide announcements and comms. Teams provides a home base for individual departments, such as your finance, marketing or customer support divisions. Finally, Projects allow you to create spaces where people in different roles and departments can communicate and share resources about a specific project they’re collaborating on.

Basecamp 3 review: Features

Each HQ, Team or Project has various tools available to it. A message board, to-do lists and scheduling all work much as you’d expect. Document and file sharing includes support for Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive, but not WebDAV. Some document formats, such as PDFs and images, display previews, but spreadsheets and word processor documents have to be downloaded or accessed via their home cloud service if you want to look at them. 

Campfire is a simple chat system with support for emoji and file attachments, including animated gifs, and the ability to tag specific people if you need their attention. It’s not very sophisticated compared to Slack or even Microsoft Teams, without threading, hashtags, multiple channels within a team or an in-chat search. 

However, you can quickly view all posted files and enable or disable notifications when people post, depending on whether you can be disturbed or not, and it’s fine for quick communication with whoever happens to be online.

Automatic Check-ins regularly ask team members a question and collect their answers, with suggested questions asking people what they worked on today, what they’ll be working on this week, what inspires them and whether they’ve read any good books.

The feature seems to primarily be oriented towards team-building and exchanging tips, but could also be used to collate friction points on a given project or, for that matter, photos of your team’s pets. However, it feels intrusive compared to the more natural flow of chat and forum communication.

Finally, and disabled by default, Email Forwards allow you and your team to forward emails – for example from clients or collaborators – to Basecamp. The first time you forward a mail, you’ll get a reply via email asking you to select which team or project area to save it under. Basecamp will at this point generate an email address for that project, and any email you forward to that address in future will be automatically sent there, including any attachments.

Once imported into Basecamp, the Email Forwards interface in the relevant project area will allow you and your colleagues to discuss and reply directly to the message. The interface here, again, isn’t particularly sophisticated – there’s no keyword tagging, for example. But it does the basics well, includes an archive for anything that’s been actioned and finished with, and provides change tracking and sharing options.

Basecamp 3 review: User experience

Each of these tools can be enabled or disabled for individual team and project workspaces, so if your team doesn’t need a given feature it doesn’t have to clutter up their interface. 

On top of that, each user has access to the Pings private chat system; an inbox called Hey (not to be confused with Basecamp’s Hey email service spin-off) which flags up anything awaiting your attention; personal and company-wide activity summaries; quick access to your bookmarks, schedule, assignments and files, and a powerful search feature.

Because Basecamp doesn’t limit the number of users you can have, admins can add as many colleagues as they like, and give them access to whichever sections of Basecamp they need; that means even external contractors can be included without needing to provision and pay for an extra seat. 

You can also invite clients to access projects they’re involved in – your teams get to set each item as viewable by the client or not, and client-accessible content is clearly marked.

Basecamp has a generally clean, pleasant UI to work with, and its web interface resizes tidily across a wide range of resolutions and window sizes. Unlike many SaaS web apps, Basecamp lets you use your browser’s back button freely and without breaking anything.

 The only element that slightly interfered with our workflow was navigating back to previous pages, which is a little non-standard. When you click from, for example, your HQ or Project’s main page to its To-do lists, you get what looks like it might be a pop-up over the previous page. 

In fact, this is an entirely new page with a dedicated URL, and if you go looking for an X or similar to close it, you won’t find one. Instead, the name of the previous Basecamp area can be found at the top of the page, and you click on that to return to it.

Basecamp 3 review: Apps & integrations

Mobile apps are available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store and provide access to all the same features as the web interface. When you click into any of the company HQ, team or project areas, you’re presented with a list of all the currently enabled tools. 

From there, you can access message boards, Campfire chats, project schedules and so on just as you would via the web interface. Most helpfully, you get all your Basecamp notifications on your phone.

Unfortunately, many of these integrations require you to subscribe to a third-party service, which adds to the total cost of your project management toolkit. Even with integrations, some features are entirely missing, conspicuously the ability to create polls, surveys and proposals.

Basecamp 3 review: Pricing

The service’s pricing is refreshingly simple: Basecamp Business costs $99 a month. That’s regardless of how many user seats, teams, projects or external clients you have. If you have more than a few staff, that quickly starts looking very competitive compared to rivals such as Microsoft Project, which starts at $10 per seat or Facebook Workplace Advanced, which costs $4 per user.

Bear in mind, though, that Basecamp is a communications and collaboration solution as much as it is for project management, and some features that are standard in Microsoft Project, such as Gantt charts, have to be bolted on to Basecamp as extensions.

If you’re a freelancer, micro-business or other very small enterprise, then all the Basecamp Business features may feel like overkill. If so, Basecamp Personal is free, giving you three projects, 20 users and a gigabyte of shared storage. You don’t get teams, customer relations features or company-wide announcements, but it also costs zero pounds and can be upgraded later if needed.

If you’re not sure whether the service does everything you’ll need, the 30-day free trial of Basecamp Business doesn’t require a credit card. If you don’t keep the subscription, Basecamp Business downgrades itself to Basecamp Personal. 

Basecamp 3 review: Verdict

Basecamp provides an excellent way of allowing colleagues to communicate both among themselves and with clients, and the fact that it’s a flat-rate service is incredibly appealing, particularly for businesses that work with a lot of external clients or contractors.

Although heavy-duty project management will still call for extra features such as time tracking and charts, Basecamp covers the basics well. Unfortunately, there are a few small quality-of-life refinements that are conspicuous by their absence, such as the ability to look at your project spreadsheets in situ or create a poll to work out the best time for a meeting.

The service is best suited to businesses with multiple small, fast-moving teams and projects whose members need to keep in touch and keep track of core documents and project milestones. It’s definitely a comfortable environment to work in, just not a particularly powerful one.

Basecamp is a web-based business collaboration, project management, and communication platform that allows you to create dedicated workspaces for your business’s teams and projects. Unlike many online collaboration tools, the subscription includes an unlimited number of users.

It also does a lot of hand-holding when you create your account, prompting you to create projects and add colleagues, before presenting its core layout in a video and giving you some sample teams and projects to play with.

You’re also guided through creating welcome messages and check-in questions for your colleagues, with pre-drafted introductions to the system that come in handy if your creativity is running low.

Basecamp is keen to introduce you to its systems through the medium of video and interaction, but there’s also an extensive manual and guide series for the latest Basecamp 3 system, making it easy to distinguish current documentation from that for previous incarnations of the platform.

It’s a fundamentally simple system. There are three categories that you can add colleagues to. HQ is for company-wide announcements and comms. Teams provides a home base for individual departments, such as your finance, marketing or customer support divisions. Finally, Projects allow you to create spaces where people in different roles and departments can communicate and share resources about a specific project they’re collaborating on.

Basecamp 3 review: Features

Each HQ, Team or Project has various tools available to it. A message board, to-do lists and scheduling all work much as you’d expect. Document and file sharing includes support for Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive, but not WebDAV. Some document formats, such as PDFs and images, display previews, but spreadsheets and word processor documents have to be downloaded or accessed via their home cloud service if you want to look at them. 

Campfire is a simple chat system with support for emoji and file attachments, including animated gifs, and the ability to tag specific people if you need their attention. It’s not very sophisticated compared to Slack or even Microsoft Teams, without threading, hashtags, multiple channels within a team or an in-chat search. 

However, you can quickly view all posted files and enable or disable notifications when people post, depending on whether you can be disturbed or not, and it’s fine for quick communication with whoever happens to be online.

Automatic Check-ins regularly ask team members a question and collect their answers, with suggested questions asking people what they worked on today, what they’ll be working on this week, what inspires them and whether they’ve read any good books.

The feature seems to primarily be oriented towards team-building and exchanging tips, but could also be used to collate friction points on a given project or, for that matter, photos of your team’s pets. However, it feels intrusive compared to the more natural flow of chat and forum communication.

Finally, and disabled by default, Email Forwards allow you and your team to forward emails – for example from clients or collaborators – to Basecamp. The first time you forward a mail, you’ll get a reply via email asking you to select which team or project area to save it under. Basecamp will at this point generate an email address for that project, and any email you forward to that address in future will be automatically sent there, including any attachments.

Once imported into Basecamp, the Email Forwards interface in the relevant project area will allow you and your colleagues to discuss and reply directly to the message. The interface here, again, isn’t particularly sophisticated – there’s no keyword tagging, for example. But it does the basics well, includes an archive for anything that’s been actioned and finished with, and provides change tracking and sharing options.

Basecamp 3 review: User experience

Each of these tools can be enabled or disabled for individual team and project workspaces, so if your team doesn’t need a given feature it doesn’t have to clutter up their interface. 

On top of that, each user has access to the Pings private chat system; an inbox called Hey (not to be confused with Basecamp’s Hey email service spin-off) which flags up anything awaiting your attention; personal and company-wide activity summaries; quick access to your bookmarks, schedule, assignments and files, and a powerful search feature.

Because Basecamp doesn’t limit the number of users you can have, admins can add as many colleagues as they like, and give them access to whichever sections of Basecamp they need; that means even external contractors can be included without needing to provision and pay for an extra seat. 

You can also invite clients to access projects they’re involved in – your teams get to set each item as viewable by the client or not, and client-accessible content is clearly marked.

Basecamp has a generally clean, pleasant UI to work with, and its web interface resizes tidily across a wide range of resolutions and window sizes. Unlike many SaaS web apps, Basecamp lets you use your browser’s back button freely and without breaking anything.

 The only element that slightly interfered with our workflow was navigating back to previous pages, which is a little non-standard. When you click from, for example, your HQ or Project’s main page to its To-do lists, you get what looks like it might be a pop-up over the previous page. 

In fact, this is an entirely new page with a dedicated URL, and if you go looking for an X or similar to close it, you won’t find one. Instead, the name of the previous Basecamp area can be found at the top of the page, and you click on that to return to it.

Basecamp 3 review: Apps & integrations

Mobile apps are available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store and provide access to all the same features as the web interface. When you click into any of the company HQ, team or project areas, you’re presented with a list of all the currently enabled tools. 

From there, you can access message boards, Campfire chats, project schedules and so on just as you would via the web interface. Most helpfully, you get all your Basecamp notifications on your phone.

Unfortunately, many of these integrations require you to subscribe to a third-party service, which adds to the total cost of your project management toolkit. Even with integrations, some features are entirely missing, conspicuously the ability to create polls, surveys and proposals.

Basecamp 3 review: Pricing

The service’s pricing is refreshingly simple: Basecamp Business costs $99 a month. That’s regardless of how many user seats, teams, projects or external clients you have. If you have more than a few staff, that quickly starts looking very competitive compared to rivals such as Microsoft Project, which starts at $10 per seat or Facebook Workplace Advanced, which costs $4 per user.

Bear in mind, though, that Basecamp is a communications and collaboration solution as much as it is for project management, and some features that are standard in Microsoft Project, such as Gantt charts, have to be bolted on to Basecamp as extensions.

If you’re a freelancer, micro-business or other very small enterprise, then all the Basecamp Business features may feel like overkill. If so, Basecamp Personal is free, giving you three projects, 20 users and a gigabyte of shared storage. You don’t get teams, customer relations features or company-wide announcements, but it also costs zero pounds and can be upgraded later if needed.

If you’re not sure whether the service does everything you’ll need, the 30-day free trial of Basecamp Business doesn’t require a credit card. If you don’t keep the subscription, Basecamp Business downgrades itself to Basecamp Personal. 

Basecamp 3 review: Verdict

Basecamp provides an excellent way of allowing colleagues to communicate both among themselves and with clients, and the fact that it’s a flat-rate service is incredibly appealing, particularly for businesses that work with a lot of external clients or contractors.

Although heavy-duty project management will still call for extra features such as time tracking and charts, Basecamp covers the basics well. Unfortunately, there are a few small quality-of-life refinements that are conspicuous by their absence, such as the ability to look at your project spreadsheets in situ or create a poll to work out the best time for a meeting.

The service is best suited to businesses with multiple small, fast-moving teams and projects whose members need to keep in touch and keep track of core documents and project milestones. It’s definitely a comfortable environment to work in, just not a particularly powerful one.

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.