about Sophos

[Jucabala]

i'd like to know your opinions about Sophos Antivirus

[octogen]

IMHO it is too expensive for the average home user and is better suited for corporate environments. The experts here can give you more details, but I think it is geared for the corporate networks.

[Technodrome]

Very good ITW detection
Improved Polymorphic detection
Can detect more the 75,000 viruses/Trojans/worms/backdoors
No automatic update feature( it's coming soon)
No email protection(but catches viruses on-fly)
no heuristics
Best support
Fast release of updates
Fast scan
Too expensive for home user!!!! Around $250 or higher...a year...
Little or no impact on resources
Uses Intercheck technology

Sophos Anti-Virus is a powerful product that offers very good virus protection and features. But it may not be for everyone(home users). Its more corporate oriented as pointed above...




Technodrome

[wizard]

There are better solutions for home users available in terms of prices and detection rates. For companies Sophos might be a good choice but for home user I see now reason to use it.

wizard

[Technodrome]

Unless you got a load of money!


Technodrome

[Ashak]

Hi,

I have used Sophos for the last couple of years paid for by my company. It did a great job overall, but updates were manual and unnecessarily complicated. I don't want to be fiddling with zip files every time there are new virus identities issued, and while I have no problems with the quality of the product, I just feel that they provide a very minimal service for a very pricey piece of software. For that much you'd expect all the bells and whistles not something so basic (no e-mail protection or atou-updating feature unless you pay substantially more for each extra).


The phone support was top-notch though.

[diginsight]

Sorry my late reply, have been very busy.

I've been using Sophos for a while. It wasn't my first choice, but I was forced to choose between Norton and Sophos and Norton has a bad reputation on supporting Novell NetWare.

Expensive? I got a 3 year license for the price of 2, supporting all of our servers, 200 desktops and free use at home. It also supports Linux and offers a SMTP mail gateway. Although, compared to 'ordinary' AV it still is expensive.

Sophos just announced a features for automatic updating on notebooks, which should make easier to support.

Sophos has released an Enterprise Manager, but it only works on Windows and I have to enable server services on all my Windows 2000 desktops.

Updating is very easy, but you have create you own scripts. I've written a script that automatically updates the virus signatures on our servers and clients.

Client configuration is much too complicated. On Windows 2000 Professional you need to create a user, give it privileges to start a service and fill in the user credentials to allow it to log in on the server hosting Sophos. I've had a discussion with the Dutch distributor about implementing Sopohs as a service and pulling updates from a network resource with read access. He didn't undestand what I meant, but this is the same model as used by Kaspersky and NOD32. Install it as adminstrator so it can run as a service and point to a central network resource to install updates.

Sophos phone has been excellent. I had a problem with my network client and they immediately pointed out I had to install an update.

For our Novell GroupWise server I'm going to implement RAV Antivirus. With Sophos I have to implement the SMTP gateway on a seperate server or implement GWAVA which can use Sophos. RAV is $ 600 with 20% yearly maintenance fee, GWAVA € 2000 and up.