Avira - anyone using the management suite?

If so I'd be interested to know how you're finding it with regards to deploying, managing and monitoring your desktops and servers.

So far I've only skimmed the surface and I'm not sure what to make of it - seems there are some "strange" concepts at a glance, for example I can only see how to set updates to be direct from the web or from a file share on our LAN, don't see a way to tell clients "LAN first, web if it's not there" i.e. laptop users.

I have a conference call/demo scheduled with an Avira distributor and I intend to give it a fair go, but I'd be interested in any feedback.

 

well i suppose there won't be many having experience with this version.
i would suggest that you command a test licene here:
http://www.avira.com/en/products/test_licence.html

if you already have one you can use this licence to contact the support here for your questions:
http://www.avira.com/en/support/index.html (support form)

 

Yup thanks.. hoping to find out more when I do the con call/remote session but of course they sell it so are a little biased

I posted a bunch of threads a couple of months back as we may have been changing vendor back then as we had an Exchange renewal due, we ended up going with Sunbelt's Ninja which meant we'd stick with our Trend desktop solution until its natural renewal date early next year.

I don't know of many forums that focus on business/enterprise stuff - I feel almost "odd one out" asking here

 

Well, I for one would be interested in testing their enterprise products but I really don't feel like manually requesting some licenses, give some trial stuff out and don't bother me with this. Shrug.

 

To be fair I just filled in a form and they emailed my a license key - no followup or verification needed.

I've also downloaded Symantec Enterprise Protection 11 and am determined to give it a fair go as I myself have always been "anti-Norton/Symantec" without ever having actually used any of their products personally.

I've installed the client on my PC and whilst it's only been a few hours there's been no fuss, drama, BSOD's etc. so that could be an interesting option.

My biggest problem is being able to do realistic testing in such a diverse environment.

 

Yikes... be extremely careful before using this one anywhere in production environment. I had nothing but huge pain with the centralized management stuff. The clients worked kinda reliably with everything but AV disabled but caused huge performance issues.

You'd be better off with the old 10.x version which uses the good old MMC instead of this Java junk in SEP11. (The SEP11 license covers both versions.)

Also, uninstalling this SEP11 thing was a big problem, very buggy installer.

 

Mind if I ask which versions of SEP11? I ask as on the Symantec website there are is a product tour and a few video interview things, almost a "Symantec TV" and they seem to have totally held their hands up to saying the first few releases of SEP11 was terrible and they think MR3 has fixed the issues etc.

The thing I'm very aware of is one mans terrible AV works fine for another - we use Trend, can't say it does anything fantastic but we don't have any major issues with it, but some here wouldn't ever go near Trend for their own reasons.

 

I've started when the initial SEP11 was released (absolutely horrible, wouldn't call that alpha even, let alone ship to customers) and gave up after MR2 MP2 testing. There are already thread here where are mentioned the issues that persist for over a year,

The management console performance is plain horrible (to put it mildly), the design is about the most unintuitive thing I've ever seen among enterprise-level management solutions, that one's plain unfixable and needs a rewrite from scratch. Also, things like missing support for domain authentication when using MSSQL very much suck. There are still issues with perpetually growing DB size, etc. etc. etc. So, the client side might get somewhat decent after 3 major and multiple minor service packs, but the actual management backend is IMHO just FUBARed.

Anyway see for yourself at their forums (and bear in mind that Symantec censors those forums and deletes all posts of banned users/customers).

 

Heh yeah I've been there.. perhaps I need to heed the phrase "When enough people tell you something...".

Going back to the original thread title, I'm hoping Avira will come up with the goods when I do the con call and get a proper overview of the product - just seems that great standalone products can be made or broken by the management software when you have a few hundred to look after.