SSL-Explorer Enterprise Edition for Windows

User Reviews

• Not yet ready.

  klatsopNovember 5, 2008

  Pros

  Clean interface, promise of client-free VPN access, rich feature set.

  Cons

  Needlessly complex setup, error- and typo-riddled documentation, various interface quirks, poor self-serve support.

  Summary

  Having been a previous user of SSL Explorer in its earlier incarnation as open-source software, I had high hopes for the early non-beta release of the product. 3sp has abandoned the open source version and now hopes to license SSL Explorer Enterprise Edition for pay. One can only assume that 3sp feels the product, after years of development and countless zero-dot beta releases, is enterprise-ready and thus worth actual money. Three attempts to upgrade over the working 0.17 version of SSL Explorer on our test server didn't go well despite instructions in the Enterprise Edition user manual that encourage such upgrades. We finally purged all traces of 0.17 off of the server and installed EE from scratch. That went better, and the instructions for setup were mostly on the mark for my configuration. It wasn't made clear in the instructions, but a server restart is advisable; our install wouldn't work without it. A couple hours later we had sorted out requirements for setting up web forwards, OWA access, application access (RDP and WOL) to various clients and servers, network places and some other configuration changes. We added each of these capabilities to its own policy group, ensuring that each capability is exposed only to the appropriate user group. Testing began with network places and RDP. These worked very well--in fact better than the older versions of SSL Explorer had worked because authentication is more transparent (read: it now works!). Outlook Web Access was fantastic after a little tweaking. We were testing web forwards to our company intranet when the train wreck happened. After attempting to access a network management web capability within our intranet, suddenly the SSL Explorer service hung and all domain resources suddenly vanished. Restarts of both the server and the clients we were using resolved the resource issues, but SSL Explorer still wouldn't function. We tried restarting the SSL Explorer server in console mode (no luck) and service mode (again no luck) and carried out diagnostics recommended in two knowledge base articles that seemed (tangentially at least) to describe some of our symptoms. No joy, and we managed to kill domain resource access once again during this process. (Yet another object lesson for why you should never test in production--ours is a test subnet.) 3sp's knowledge base on SSL Explorer is extremely sparse, and we found very little documented web experience (who is using this product, anyway?). We decided to contact 3sp's tech support tomorrow and put this upgrade on the back burner indefinitely. Oddly, 3sp's web site seems to leave it up for doubt whether SSL-Explorer EE is even in general release. It's possible to download hte latest version of EE, and the automated eval license section of the web site worked, issuing us a 30-day eval license promptly. But links in the installed product itself end in a 404 page on 3sp's web site. The SSL Explorer sales page has the statement that "purchasing is not enabled" or some such, and there are no instructions for how one actually goes about paying the licensing fee. An email to Sales (midday US Central Time) went unanswered until after close of business. Perhaps our expectations are too high for responsiveness from a relatively small firm based six time zones away in Britain. Still, we were disappointed overall. Software marketed to small and medium business must be able to coexist on consolidated servers running other capabilities (such as Active Directory). This kind of software needs to be rock-solid reliable and if it does fail it must not affect other processes. A package that allows a user's browsing behavior to take down an entire domain and (evidently) corrupt the install of the package itself is simply unacceptable. We may have done something ham-fisted in configuring SSL-Explorer, but the price for that kind of mistake shouldn't be failure of an entire domain. That said, we wonder if there's anything 3sp can do or say to restore our confidence in this product in production. For now we'll stick with 0.17 and let other customers debug this dot-zero release.

  ---

• Show reviewsHide reviews
• Rate it