Which Norton Product

If anyone can help, it would be much appreciated!

I originally set out to find an antivirus program for my organization.  I found Norton Antivirus, but then started looking at having other features, that are included in 360, systemworks, ect...

Here I hit the roadblock!  Most of the higher end Norton packages seem to have only small differences between them all!  They all ‘claim’ to do the same things, such as antivirus, firewall, keep your system running clean, ect ect...

I’m not that technically illiterate, but I’m now lost in which program to get... or if its better to get the enterprise version!

Please help with any feedback regarding pros/cons to each of the products, and what the benefits would be to choose one particular product.

Thanks in advance!

hscadirector, I moved your post to this forum as I thought you'd get better responses in here.  One thing you may discover with the 360 or system works products is that they are resource hogs.  WIndows has a good firewall built in, so you don't really need another one to replace it.  We have had Symantec Corporate AV for many years now and it has worked great.  It is centrally managed, which is a huge time saver and bandwidth saver.  You install it on a server and push out the installs to all your client machines.  Only the server goes out to the internet for updates and then it pushed the updates to the clients.  AVG and Trend Micro offer similar products as well.  How many computers are you looking to protect? 

I've used Symantec Corp AV for the past few years without issue. I did try AVG free a while back but it broke on about 2 out of 10 machines, so I stopped using it.  I've also used McAfee Enterprise AV successfully but you can get Symantec thru Techsoup at a great price so I would go that route.

I have been using AVG free for 9 years and never had a workstation become infected with a virus.  I think you should couple AVG free with a good free spyware scanner like spybot search and destroy.  I have used Symantec Corp AV and liked it a lot.  If you have a lot of workstations and you are running in a windows active directory enviroment I like the symantec corp av solution, if only have few workstations then AVG free would be the way to go...

Please look at this thread.  We are discussing whether or not it's a violation of the user agreement for a Non-Profit to install AVG Free on all of their computers.  I believe it is in violation.  Consider this text taken from the AVG Free website:

AVG Free Website:

Limited features, no support, for private and non-commercial use only.  AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is only available for single computer use for home and non commercial use.

I concur with Mr. Shipley on the AVGFree usage.  I'm currently trying to right (what I perceive to be) a wrong by finding an antivirus solution that will replace the 200+ installments of AVGFree my supervisor did.

Another limitation with some of the "free" products is the lack of centralized administration.  I've used both Symantec Enterprise and Sophos Enterprise and the convenience of knowing the status of your clients no matter where they are geographically located is a major plus.  

I came here to find out whether folks prefer Symantec Corporate or Endpoint.  I am familiar with prior Symantec Enterprise AV's resource hogging (rtvscan.exe) and bandwidth issues when running a virus sweep.  I am encouraged by your resource comments and am now leaning toward Sym Corporate AV.  I want to know if folks would advise putting it on a dedicated server (we can get it via Techsoup).  

By the way, Sophos Enterprise AV did a great job when I used it a year ago.  Not free but very low resource overhead.

Is anyone running their Symantec in a peer to peer environment?  If so, any problems connecting to clients?

We run the symantec (norton) antivirus corporate. No firewall, no internet security -- just the antivirus. It works fine. Centrally managed, and it crushes any viruses and intrusions, alerting both the user, the server and selected logons. We have it update and scan overnight (it wakes up the machines from powersave to run) just after teh WSUS microsoft updates.

The windows firewall works fine -- and if it aint broke - dont fix it. So all our downloads for update are processed on the server between midnight at 0430 - once - then the server distributes to the computers. It also means the downloads are not done in 'peak' times when our bandwidth costs more.

I've actually had a great experience with NOD32 by eset software recently.  They offer NPO discounts - when I asked the formula for discounting they said its about 50%, but depends on quantity and length of subscription.  Its lightweight on the client side and does have some central administration for distibution and management.  I recommend reading all you can about the centralized management and doing a couple tests before deploying it into your network though, because its not as intuitive as the Symantec console I've used.  Also I've had difficulty setting up the centralized update point (where the server dowloads updates and workstations get updates from the server) but it has the ability.  I like the price and I like how much they were willing to work with me on the phone and answer questions I had.  They are rewriting some of the manuals on how to get the software up and running properly - and had suggested I look at a video one of their software engineers put together on getting it to work in a Windows Active Directory environment.  Just thought I'd mention them.  I just used the antiVirus 4 business edition, not the Smart Security.  I was happy with the feature set of the antivirus.  And of course they have a free trial.

Hi there, have you considered a cloud based security solution such as Panda Managed Office Protection? I'm currently evaluating it as an alternative to our current deployment of AVG SBS Edition 8.x.

That's interesting, SEFIT - thanks for pointing it out.  Personally, I wouldn't want securit that depended too much on the web - but having said that clearly my current security does depend a lot on the web in order to get proper updates.  At $75 a seat, however, I'd be looking for a hardware device and not just software as a service.  Are there any NPO discounts available?  I couldn't see any.

Hi Shipley.c,

I thought the listed price was expensive too, but when I enquired about NGO pricing I was pleasantly surprised with a substantially discounted price for our 75 endpoints.

Other vendors have similar "Enterprise" products on offer too, which are ideal for the dispursed nature of some NGO operations, but for some reason they don't always disclose their NGO licensing policies.

I'm leaning toward getting the straight Norton antivirus (thanks for everyone's advice) and I want to know, how many of you are using it on an Active Directory domain?  How many of you are using it peer-to-peer?  We are peer-to-peer (200+ users) and I need to know if the Norton console has any trouble finding clients in a peer-to-peer environment.

I asked Norton pre-sales and they said it should work fine but they weren't certain.