Labs

Central to Symantec's enterprise security software is System Center, which provides a remote console from where a variety of anti-virus products are managed. It installs as an MMC snap-in to which you add further modules, depending on the products you wish to manage. Once the Norton AntiVirus snap-in is loaded, you arrange your anti-virus servers into groups according to how you want to manage your clients. Each server group requires a primary server that manages the configuration and tasks for the group and may be used to deliver new signature updates.

Installation is a lengthy but well-documented process, and System Center can populate groups automatically, as it runs a network discovery routine over both IP and IPX. Groups are easily modified by dragging and dropping servers into a different group, and

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all associated clients will be carried across with the server. Local protection for servers and clients is handled by the network version of Norton AntiVirus, which is easily deployed from the System Center console. A real-time scanner is permanently loaded in the background and takes its instructions from a primary or secondary server. There are plenty of scan options, and files may be sent to a Quarantine server, which requires another MMC snap-in before it can be managed remotely.

Deploying scanning rules to multiple systems is simple - right-click on a group or server and select either the server or client real-time scan options. Your choices are automatically sent to the relevant systems. It's possible to lock out attempts to unload or uninstall the software and request a password before a user can scan a network drive.

Symantec's team of LiveUpdate and VDTM (virus definition transport method) regularly downloads updates and pushes them to clients, although we found this partnership difficult to set up and poorly documented. Alerting, on the other hand, is particularly impressive. Symantec's AMS2 keeps you in touch with the action, sending out a wide variety of warnings if viral activity is detected or if any problems with the anti-virus software itself are identified. Customised messages may also be created and it's possible to associate more than one alert action with an event.