Our Marketing department has been fighting tooth and nail with this IronPort web filter for getting access to Social Networking sites for their marketing efforts. Normally this type of content is blocked so the majority of employees don't waste their time playing around on them. Marketing needs these types of sites open for their research and new Gen-Y marketing initiatives.
I enabled "Social Networking" and it does open up Facebook, Twitter, but some sites are still blocked under "Online Communities".
I take it that it's safe to enable "Online Communities" (whatever the heck that is), but what is the difference. One example is tumblr, and that is without a doubt a social networking site, however IronPort is blocking it based on the "Online Communities" rule. My guess would of been that "Online Communities" would be message board sites run by the likes of Invision Board, phpBB, VBulletin, etc.... That to me is a "community". Stuff like tumblr, reddit, digg, flicker, del.ico.us is all Social Networking to me.
So really what is the difference and what is the best way to get this stuff reclassified? Open a ticket with TAC? Is there an online listing of what website is which category, or do you have to just plug each one in the Policy Trace tool and see what comes back in the URL check section?
