The company I work for supports many SOHO, small and medium sized clients. Many of my smaller clients would like us to manage their AV/Spyware. I would like to be able to do this from a central console. From what I can tell, the Admin Console might be able to accomplish this task. I have installed the product and am working through the extensive features, but am running into some road or mental blocks. Any advice or direction would appreciated.
Based on what I have read the best approach would be to setup a hierarchy where we hold the master licenses for the product and have a master console and all of our client are under this console. We then can allocate licenses to our clients and set them up to be managed under our master console. For larger clients they would have a child console that would run on their network and would manage deployments and updates. For smaller clients, they would fall under the master console and would be managed directly.
Questions:
- All of the networks are not connected. Many have some limited VPN capabilities. Can the above be done? If so what are the limitations and challanges. Do only certain things work with a VPN.
- For the smaller clients, they are often mobile or are on home networks. VPN, port forwarding or any bidriectional direct access to the master server is simply not possible. Can they be part of the console. What needs to be setup on their end and what are the limitations. What information will be available from the console about these clients.
- I am assuming that none of the home products work with the Admin Console.
- I assume for the remote (number 2) users, unless I can open some ports or establish a VPN connection I cannot push anything to the workstations.
- Will this model cause any problem with licensing?
- Do all of the licenses expire based on when they were purchased, Installed or deployed. So if I buy 25 and roll them out over a 6 month period would they all expire when I purchased the license or when they were installed.
- How does the home Anti-Virus compare/differ from the workstation version. Is the workstation more comparible to the Internet Security product.
- Does the workstation product work on XP Home or Vista Home Products
- Any other random advise would be appreciated.
Side Questions
- I have installed the console and begun doing some initial testing. I have run into some issues, that I suspect are more my ignorance that product limitations, I was hoping to get some feedback.
- What is a full scan. My workstation keeps telling me that I need to run a full scan, I have run a scan on everything but email, but it keeps telling me I need to run a full scan.
- How do the Incremental scan work. I ran a system scan twice and it took the same amount of time both times, i would have expected the second time to be much faster.
- I have outlook 2003 running against an exchange server. The file is an OST but not setup for offline caching. When the email scan runs it seems to be scanning the emails on the server. This was going to take 4 days and I assume would take the same amount of time each time. If emails are not scanned will I never get a "full Scan". Is there a way to optimize this so emails can be scanned?
- I have noticed some issues with the program and Mozy Online. The antivirus seems to want to scan the online backup files each time they change, which causes both programs to start to take resources. Is this an known issue or not a problem I should worry about.
Thank you in advance for any help provided. Please include any suggestions or advise you can think of as I go through this evaluation process.
Rok