Keep Internet ads from Annoying your Employees/Students

Novell Cool Solutions: Trench
By Marcus Williamson

Digg This - Slashdot This Posted: 12 Sep 2002

If Internet advertising is too distracting for your employees or students, you might want to check out this new tool from one of our partners.

AdWall is a solution to the increasing problem of Internet banner advertising. Internet banner advertising has become ubiquitous and increasingly intrusive and can cause problems for the following reasons:

• Advertising is a distraction.
• Advertising images take up valuable bandwidth on the local network.
• Advertising wording may display spurious warning messages, mislead the computer user into believing there is a problem with their computer and generate unnecessary support calls.
• Clicking on advertisements displayed in the browser may take users to non-business related or undesirable sites.

AdWall resolves this problem by blocking the display of advertising graphics from known advertising host sites. The advantages of using AdWall compared with other third-party solutions include:

• AdWall operates in conjunction with your existing Novell BorderManager software and does not require additional server or gateway hardware.
• AdWall is simple to install and configure.
• AdWall integrates with your existing administration tools.
• Once deployed, AdWall can be left running without any further intervention from the Administrator.
• The list of sites blocked by AdWall is completely open to inspection and can be easily added to or edited by the Administrator.

For more info, check out the documentation, and try a 45-day Beta evaluation. Get all the details at http://www.connectotel.com/adwall/

Q&A about this Article NEW

What kinds of ads will AdWall block? Only banners? Or does it also deal with the nefarious pop-ups and pop-unders?

Marcus: It currently deals with graphics banners (any size/shape) from a number of known ad sites. The list of sites can be edited by the administrator.

AdWall works on the basis of blocking a site name and type of file (GIF/JPG etc). With the current version of AdWall popups will still appear, but they won't have any content. We're looking at the issue of "pop ups" as found on many of the "free" web space providers.

Reader Comments

• Two notes that may be useful: use Mozilla browser which has built-in popup blocking, or use the AdShield (http://www.adshield.org) plugin for Internet Explorer. Both solutions are completely free, and ZEN for Desktops can be used to push out new AdShield block lists at any time.

Novell Cool Solutions (corporate web communities) are produced by WebWise Solutions. www.webwiseone.com