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Welcome to Qbik, the original home of WinGate software
Founded in 1995, Qbik is a privately owned software development company specialising in Internet connectivity and security. Qbik has a range of software products allowing users to manage their Internet connectivity (WinGate), connect remote offices together (WinGate VPN), and combat network security issues (NetPatrol).
When it was first released in October 1995, WinGate was the world's first Internet connection sharing proxy solution for MS Windows, allowing users simultaneous access to the Internet over a single connection. Since then WinGate has evolved into a sophisticated yet easy-to-use Internet connectivity management suite.
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WinGate Proxy Server
WinGate is a sophisticated integrated Internet
gateway and communications server designed to meet the control, security and
communications needs of today's businesses. In addition to a comprehensive range
of features, WinGate Proxy Server's license options provide you the flexibility
to match your needs to your budget, whether you need to manage an enterprise,
small business, or home network.
Key Functions
WinGate Proxy Server allows you to:
- Provide secure and managed Internet access
for your entire network via a single or multiple shared internet connections
- Enforce advanced and flexible access-control
and acceptable use policies
- Monitor usage in real time, and maintain
per-user and per-service audit logs.
- Stop viruses, spam and inappropriate content
from entering your network
- Provide comprehensive internet and intranet
email services.
- Protect your servers from internal or
external threats.
- Improve network performance and
responsiveness with web and DNS caching
- Ease administration burdens on your internal
networks.
Key Benefits
Using WinGate Proxy Server to actively manage the
use of your Internet and network resources can provide many benefits, including:
- Improved Employee productivity through
reduced time wastage
- Reduced time and resources required to
maintain network integrity
- Reduced Employer liabilities
- Improved efficiency, responsiveness and
reliability of network access
Internet Sharing
WinGate Proxy Server will share most types of
Internet connection, allowing multiple users to simultaneously surf the web,
retrieve their email, or use other internet programs, as if they were directly
connected to the Internet. Whether it is a simple dialup modem or high speed
fibre, WinGate Proxy Server can help to make the most out of the connection.
WinGate Proxy Server supports a wide variety of Internet protocols, allowing
applications such as Web browsers, messaging software, FTP and SSL. WinGate
Proxy Server also supports DirectPlay Internet games and Real Time Streaming
Audio/Video.
Control Internet Access
With WinGate Proxy Server's user database and
policies, administrators can limit and control user access to the Internet. With
logging, auditing, and a real time activity and history viewer, detailed records
of user activities can be easily examined. This makes WinGate Proxy Server ideal
for companies, schools, Internet cafes or any environment where Internet access
needs to be monitored closely.
Built-in Security
WinGate Proxy Server comes with a built-in
packet-inspecting firewall. Your network safety can be further enhanced with
optional plug-in components, available seperately, which will scan incoming data
for viruses, or filter out inappropriate content in web traffic.
Read how WinGate
Proxy Server has helped some of the 750,000 + registered customers to make the
most of their Internet connection.
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WinGate 7 released
We are all very pleased to
announce the public release of WinGate 7.0.
Downloads:
We have:
- moved
the old WinGate 6 downloads to the archive section on our web hosting
server. This means any hard-coded links to the old downloads will now be
redirected to the download page on
www.wingate.com.
-
updated the links in the WinGate 7 update system, so existing beta and RC
users will be informed of the new release within the next 24 hours.
- not
changed the version we advertise for WinGate 6 update checking. We plan to
wait for a week before doing this to reduce impact of any potential issues
with the release.
WinGate VPN
After quite a lot of thought, we decided not to offer a separate download and
install for WinGate VPN. However, we still sell a WinGate VPN license so it can
still be considered a separate product. As you should all be aware, WinGate VPN
always was just WinGate, with a different user interface switched by the
license, and different help file.
With the changes in WinGate
7, it made no sense to continue this approach, since:
- the
entire user interface is built according to what features are licensed
anyway
- The
help system is componentised also
- Many
of the new features are available in WinGate VPN, and it made no sense to
try and show these in a different overall user interface
This means that to install WinGate VPN, a customer should install
WinGate, and then activate a WinGate VPN license.
Reminder About Licensing
for WinGate 7
We removed the version designation from licenses, so we won't be selling WinGate
7 licenses, only WinGate licenses.
The only requirement for
existing WinGate 6 license holders to update to WinGate 7 is that they must have
had valid version protection as of January 1st 2011. If their version protection
had expired before then they will need to renew it to run WinGate 7.
WinGate 7 Licensing
WinGate 7 uses the exact same licenses and keys as WinGate 6. We removed version
labelling from the licenses to reiterate this fact.
Eligibility of a license to
be activated in WinGate 7 is solely a function of its version protection
expiry date (anything expiring post 1 Jan 2011 is eligible). Therefore any new
licenses may be used in both WinGate 6 and 7. Please help to get the word out to
your customers because the more users we can get running WinGate 7 now the
better.
WinGate 6 Licenses and
Version Protection
Any WinGate 6 licenses with valid version protection as of January 1st 2011 will
be able to activate their license in WinGate 7.
Customers running WinGate 6
whose version protection is expired and the expiry is prior to 1 Jan 2011 will
need to update version protection in order to be able to activate their license
in WinGate 7.
New online documentation
system
Our new online help system is now available, and WinGate 7 documentation has
been uploaded to it. This site allows for uploading / decompilation of CHM files
and management of help content. It also has a facility to generate help files
for download on demand - users can download the complete .chm file, or build
their own collection of help pages by selecting relevant topics.
The system can also be used
to author and maintain help, as well as collect feedback and community input on
topics. We plan to make this the source of help documentation for off-line help
going forward.
WinGate of course still ships
with off-line, in-product help accessed through the F1 key from within the
WinGate Administration Console. To get the latest documentation customers should
go to:
help.qbik.com
WinGate 7 YouTube Videos
and Twitter
If you haven't seen it, we have a YouTube channel with videos on using WinGate 7
which you can find here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/QbikNZltd
We also have a Twitter
account if you'd like to follow us for all the latest updates, you can find us
on Twitter here:
http://twitter.com/#!/WinGate |
WinGate 7.2: the return of the free license.
We've been working pretty hard over the last month or so on WinGate 7.2. The
most significant and exciting change, and one which affects you all is the
re-introduction of a free licensee.
From the very start back on
October 5 1995 when WinGate 1.0 was first released, we had a free version. Back
then it was free for the user on the proxy plus one other network user. Around
2002, we were convinced to discontinue this, and since then (even before WinGate
6) WinGate usage has been in decline.
After numerous discussions
in-house and with several of you, we decided to re-introduce a free license, the
main reasons are as follows:
-
There are a number of competing products which
offer a free license, or are completely free. You get a lot more for a free
product nowadays.
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By and large, these free products dominate on
the internet, in terms of search results, discussions, blogs, etc.
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We believe WinGate is a lot better than these
other products, but doesn't perform as well in terms of web traffic, and
sales opportunities.
-
We believe by making a version of WinGate
available for free, we should be able to dominate in the free product space,
and reap benefits of greatly increased market presence, thereby increasing
market share and revenues. We're in this for the money.
-
To date, WinGate 7 has proven much better at
up-selling to higher-tier licenses than previous versions did.
What to give away
The type of license we
decided to make free is the WinGate Standard 3 user license. In addition
to this, we made the ability to participate in a VPN available to all WinGate
licenses (effectively the single user license).
We also spent a fair bit of
time going over what sort of offering we should make for free, since even the
WinGate Standard 3 user license is fairly capable. It's a lot of proxy for the
money. The main reasons we opted for this license are:
-
Competing products offer around 3 users.
-
We make very little from sales of Standard 3
user licenses.
-
We didn't see any features we could easily
further restrict from the restrictions already applied to Standard.
-
Creating another tier of license has a number of
other development and deployment problems.
What it means for you
What this means, is that we
will have a number of customer issues, and changes required to websites. We
currently plan to cease sales of WinGate Standard 3 user, and WinGate VPN Remote
Client licenses, since these are effectively now free..
It's possible some customers
may still wish to obtain these licenses, e.g. if they are running WinGate 6, or
still want a VPN only license. I would imagine convincing most people to go with
the free license will not be difficult.
Support for free users
We don't expect you to
provide support for free users, but we plan to still provide support to these
customers. This is because:
-
We don't want to worsen support experience for
existing customers by making them cross a threshold (proof of purchase, or
proof of trial).
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We currently provide full support for trial
users. People won't buy the product if they can't get it working.
-
We hope to greatly increase the number of users,
and support burden (!!) in order to provide better information for
development priorities.
So, if you have customers you
think would like the free version, feel free to support them, or pass them
through to us.
How it works
The free license is available from 7.2 onwards only, and
requires activation. So a customer will need to download and install this
version. When activating, a 3rd option is now available, being to activate a
free license. Requiring activation gives us ongoing control about the
availability of the free license, and what it can do. There's not much more to
it than that. There are a few restrictions:
-
The system won't allow more than 1 free license
per installation.
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Even if the customer manages to obtain more than
1 matching activation files for free licenses, only 1 will be loaded by
WinGate.
-
If any other WinGate license is installed (e.g.
paid or trial), the free license will not provide any additional user count.
-
If a user has a trial installed, and activates a
free license, the trial will be removed (prevents nasty surprises when the
trial expires).
-
The activation files create by the free license
are not usable in older versions of WinGate (so if the customer rolls back
version, it will stop). This is to prevent circumvention of the restrictions
on free licenses.
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