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Bloxx Web Filter Helps DeVoe Automotive Family of Dealerships Drive Productivity

Background

Working from two locations in Naples, FL, The DeVoe Automotive Family of Dealerships’ 160 employees are committed to delivering exceptional sales and service experiences to their customers.

Proudly selling Cadillac, Buick, GMC, Subaru and Saab vehicles, the company also prides itself on being a leader in the local community.

The Challenge

The DeVoe Automotive Family of Dealerships had been using a Web filtering product from SurfControl, however the filter was difficult to manage and required constant administration in order to fulfil DeVoe’s content management needs. Additionally, throughput was slow and the product was only moderately reliable. When Websense acquired SurfControl, customer support became non-existent; the IT team at DeVoe knew they needed a new solution. Robert Manchette, IT Administrator at DeVoe, explains: “Websense wanted us to migrate to their product, but that also incurred an additional increase in our yearly web filtering maintenance, which forced us to look for an alternative web filtering solution.”

It was essential that Manchette could find a Web filter he could rely on to effectively manage employee Internet usage with a good degree of granularity. Manchette was looking for a tool which would help the company improve workforce productivity, and give him the flexibility to create different access permissions for different groups within the company.

Furthermore, the team at DeVoe needed to be confident that if they ran into issues, support was available in a timely fashion.

The Solution

Having researched the marketplace, in late 2008 Manchette chose the Bloxx 500W Web filter.

Powered by patent-pending Tru-View Technology, Bloxx Web filters offer genuine real-time categorization of Wepages, resulting in dynamic coverage of the ever-growing amount of content hosted online. Rather than rely on manually-updated URL databases, the Bloxx Web Filter is able to analyze and categorize content even if it is brand new or has been updated, meaning administrators have full control over what their users see without relying on their Web filtering provider to keep on top of the millions of new Web pages appearing every day.

The Results

“With the Bloxx Web Filter, we expected to cut down traffic and improve productivity,” explains Manchette, “and we’ve definitely achieved that.”

“We’re confident now that our employees are using the company Internet for work purposes, not for shopping or other personal surfing. Decreased traffic and bandwidth usage has been a key benefit of the Bloxx product for us.”

The reporting capabilities of the Web filter allow Manchette to double-check employees’ online behavior, and once a month he runs a report to identify any potential abuses of the company system.

DeVoe’s network has also benefited from increased protection against Web-borne security threats, as Manchette notes: “We’re confident that Bloxx has helped us reduce our exposure to viruses and malware.”

Additionally, IT productivity is higher, through the reduction of administrative maintenance required by the Bloxx Web Filter: “It’s made my job much easier,” says Manchette, “I now spend far less time baby-sitting people and less time repairing computers than I used to. We’ve saved time, money and resources since we bought the Bloxx Web filter.”

He concludes: “The Bloxx Web Filter is far better than what we had before, and so we’ve had no reason to look for anything else.”