In the fall of 2006, editors for the TechTarget Windows network of sites -- SearchWinIT.com, SearchExchange.com, SearchWindowsSecurity.com, SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com -- invited vendors in the Windows market to nominate their products for the Products of the Year 2006 awards.

To be eligible for consideration, products had to have been introduced or significantly upgraded between Sept. 30, 2005 and Oct. 1, 2006. For previously available products, the upgrade must have incorporated major new features that were designed to meet new or evolving needs in the marketplace.

For SearchExchange.com, we looked at products in four categories -- Exchange Server archiving and compliance, Exchange Server backup and recovery, Exchange Server security and Exchange Server reporting and management.

Each category had its own set of judges, who rated the products in seven categories:

• Innovation
• Performance
• Ease of integration
• Ease of use and manageability
• Functionality
• Value
• Service and support

We then tallied the judges ratings separately and aggregated them with those of the other judges to come up with a single numerical score.