TITUS Aware for Microsoft Outlook review

The XML files are also used to maintain lists of unacceptable words or phrases and patterns such as social security or credit card numbers. If required, you can add advisory headers and footers to outbound messages along with metadata that may be used by security appliances to check that TA message processing has occurred.

The Administration Tool is simple to use and groups all policy components under a set of nested folders. The controls in the Global Options tab let you enable or disable TA and modify general settings such as loading a splash screen for Outlook users. A useful option is support for Outlook's calendar and tasks, so appointments and job assignments can also be included in DLP policies.

The Global Options are used to activate features for the TA Outlook agent and control how it behaves.

From the user's perspective TA presents a shallow learning curve. When we next loaded Outlook on our clients we found a new set of icons in the Ribbon with the first providing quick access to TA's content checker.

Users can classify messages from the Outlook Ribbon and if they infringe a policy plenty of remediation assistance is provided.

Selecting this applies the active policy and the user will be advised if the message fails. A pop-up window warns the user of a policy failure and shows the reasons for this. They can then opt to correct the message and TA provides a wizard showing them what needs to be done. Parts of the message can be automatically redacted so they can't be read. If the user chooses to send the message without verifying it first, it will still be subject to the same policy checks.

TA's justification feature can be used to give some users more leeway with their message content. If this is enabled in the policy settings, the user may ignore validation failures and sent the message anyway. If they do, TA loads a dialogue box asking them to provide a reason which will be logged.