Building filter components

Use the Policy Management > Filter Components page to access tools used to refine and customize your policies. The 3 buttons on the screen are associated with the following tasks:

Edit Categories
  • Recategorize a URL (see Reclassifying specific URLs). For example, if the Shopping category is blocked by your policies, but you want to permit access to specific supplier or partner sites, you could move those sites to a permitted category, like Business and Economy.
  • Define or edit custom categories (see Creating a custom category). Create additional subcategories within pre-defined parent categories, or within the User- Defined parent category, and then assign URLs to the new categories.
  • Assign keywords to a category (see Keyword-based policy enforcement). To recategorize and block access to sites whose URLs contain a specific string, first define keywords, and then enable keyword blocking in a category filter.
  • Create regular expressions (see Using regular expressions), patterns or templates that can be used to match multiple URLs and assign them to a category.
Edit Protocols Create or edit custom protocol definitions (see Creating a custom protocol and Editing custom protocols). For example, if members of your organization use a custom messaging tool, you could create a custom protocol definition to permit use of that tool while blocking other Instant Messaging / Chat protocols.
File Types Create or edit file type definitions, used to block files with specific extensions within otherwise permitted categories (see Managing traffic based on file type).