About URL Filtering

URL Filtering allows you to restrict access to certain Web sites based on content. Filtering occurs at the request stage—if the client URL request matches a policy rule, a filtering action (allow, block, block w/override, monitor, time limit or warn) is applied. For the block action, a connection is never established with the target server.

You can override the filtering for any given site by adding the root URL to an approved URL list and include this list to the URL filtering policy.

• Tip: Intranet pages will not exist in the database. Rather than subjecting these known pages to the process of lookup and analysis, it is more efficient to exempt the entire site up front in an approved list and include this list in the URL filtering policy.

URL filtering is policy-based. You can grant different access rights to different people or groups in the organization, as well as specify an "in-effect" time. If a user is affected by more than one policy, the policy with the highest priority takes precedence.

Policies are stored in the database so different IWSVA servers can share the same policy as long as they are all using the same database.

See also:

• Changing the Default Block Time