This is for the company a work for about 2 years ago. Their contract with the old company was done. They want to change company because of some problem they got with the old software.

Our work environment:
The environments include staff members, researcher and IT members. There were more than 600 clients, some had laptops and others PC, and they were several different servers. Some clients use Windows XP others use Vista and there still are some using Windows 2000.

With researcher the company needs to have a great antivirus system. We cannot afford to lose data that is not back up yet. Or have a PC infected that slow down the PC while running simulation.

The big challenge of finding the right company for them:
The process of choosing a company is long and painful. It starts with the research on product we could use. We have to search the web for blog and comparison on each product to see which has the best option. We also go on forum to have an idea of the problem we could face and the more common one. We check if those problems could occur for their company. We also do research on the company itself to see if they offer great support or not. In this case we saw that the forum is a great place to find solution to our problem.

We had 3 different people doing some research and after we each made a presentation for the IT staff. After that each person on the staff decides which company they want and vote. Them before confirming the choice, they take the top 2 and make a list of biggest problem found. They also compare the price to see it there is one more affordable than the other. After the comparison, they decide which one would be easier for their company.

Why did we choose Symantec:
We choose Symantec because of the easy monitoring of each PC. It is easy to see which PC are infected, what the virus. You can also scan remotely, you have log on every virus found and report. There some graph that show which PC is at which virus definition. Let just says there is great tools for remote support and report.

Updating to the new version of anti-virus is also pretty easy. You can do it remotely. Even with the problem I will discuss later, I still manage to find a way of doing it remotely.

Problem face during the change:
We send a email to all our employees to remove the old antivirus, since most of them have administrator rights. I still had problem installing remotely to the some of PC that had remove it, the same problem I had about 2 weeks ago but could not remember the solution. I had to check the following for the PC that would not work.

-Make sure to disable Simple File Sharing on all target clients.
-Make sure to disable the Windows firewall if the PC is on the network or to enable communication on TCP ports 139 and 445 and UDP ports 137 and 138 if the PC is not on the network.
-Make sure that the File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks is enabled.
-Make sure that the C$ and Admin$ shares on the target clients are accessible from the Manager system.
-Make sure that the username of who ever will “push” the new version is in Control Panel-> Administrator Tool-> Local Security Policy-> Local Policies-> User Rights Asssignements-> Access this computer from the network.
-Make sure that the remote registry service running

I had a big problem with PC that the remote registry service was not running. Since I did not want to do all those PC one by one. I had to find how to turn the service on remotely. After a couple of hours of reading on the web about the remote registry service, to know if it is safe and the exact use of the service. I found a little script that I could run remotely to turns the remote registry service on. Using the little script save me a couple of hours of work, finding in which room those PC were and them turning on manually the remote registry service.

There is also some PC that is not on the network server. For those I had to do it manually since it would not authenticated remotely. In general, it was not that bad. I had to do it manually also for the one that the employees didn't remove it.

After the change:
Now the company IT manager is pretty happy with Symantec. They have fewer problems managing the system. Their still problem with the removal of some virus that a lot of anti-virus software have, in those case they end up reformatting the PC. And all the false positive that Symantec have in heuristic mode. But they’re still pretty happy with the move they choose.

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