IE and Group Policy question

i need to lock down my users IE access. i would like to know what's the best way to do this, and if its possible thru group policy in windows 2000.

i expermineted with the content advisor, but its too difficult to enable websites (for instance just enabling dell.com does not get you dell's whole website, since dell also uses www1.us......etc)
and i can enable the allow unrated websites, but that is too loose for me.

i am not so much worried about people visting adult sites anyways. i want people only hitting sites during work hours that are work related sites. so far no joy on my end.


also i wish to be able to monitor site access across the network and see what sites are being visited. how can i accomplish this, is there any way in windows 2k or do i need 3rd party software.

thank you

You want a proxy server or possibly a (very expensive) hardware based Internet access control device such as Cisco's Pix. The MS flagship product is Internet Security & Acceleration Server.

Edit: uh actually the Pix doesn't do proxy stuff. I don't recall the name of the hardware box we had doing this at my last job, but I do remember it was wicked expensive.

thank you for the information! i am looking into ISA as we speak, and i found a nice product from symantec, web security 3.0.
both act as proxy servers (of course you know that about the ISA) and would have the added benefit of enhancing my exsiting firewall! thank you for the information
jim

good luck mate

ISA when you set it up is extreamly good. I use it all the time. Depending on your net config to use it it might take a bit of doing but www.isaserver.org has lots of tutorials to help out and very helpful message boards. If you can wait, wait till next year when Microsoft releases ISA Server 2004, should be a lot better, seeing as ISA is 3 years old, but still going strong :bigyello:. You can do everything you wanted in your post with ISA server when you set it up and it works a charm with all versions of windows.