If a company choses Windows 7 Enterprise edition instead of Windows 7 Professional, would the built-in features be a good substitute for third party laptop encryption tools (Encryption Plus, Credent etc.) and third party data protection tools (like McAfee Data Loss Prevention, Symantec DLP etc.) and would the cost per desktop of upgrade to Enterprise generally be less than the cost of purchasing third party tools? How do features compare between built-in Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise security features vs third party? For instance, with Windows 7 Enterprise, will you be able to restrict USB flash drive access to only approved encrypted flash drives as opposed to being limited to either allow all USB drives or deny access to all USB drives? If there is still a need to purchase the third party products, then it may be better to stay with the lower cost Professional version of Windows 7.

If you purchase the Enterprise Edition you can use bitlocker to encrypt the HDD and Bitlocker To Go to encrypt USB devices. So you don't need to buy 3rd party tools. You can download the 90day Enterprise Trial and compare the buildin tools against the 3rd party tools and decide what meets your requirements. André"A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/

I know you can set up policies to completely block access to USB, but can Bitlocker be configured so data can be copied if a USB drive is encrypted, but blocked if the drive is not encrypted? Block both read and write access to unencrypted USB drives? This is a feature of third party security tools.