Review: Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus 2003 and Symantec Client Security

I have been running both products in my lab for the past week, and I keep going back and forth on which would be better for my own circumstances, let alone various other scenarios. Here is the trouble: NAV2003 has the most sophisticated antivirus protection of the two and in general has great improvements on the venerable NAV product line. One example is automatic protection for content received through instant messaging software from AOL, MSN and Yahoo. (A nice touch is that the protection is automatically enabled even after NAV software is installed--if you later install IM clients to your desktop, you are still protected.) But NAV is a strictly desktop-focused solution, and corporations or resellers who want to deploy it will have to load it up on each machine across the enterprise: a tedious task.

Plus, NAV is also an anti-virus solution: it doesn't protect users from malicious content, network intrusions or code that will take over your system that comes from viewing Web pages. That's where SCS comes into play. The software provides a one-stop integration of tools to prevent these threats, and the various modules of code talk to each other to protect your computer, as the bad guys get more sophisticated. In theory, it is a great idea.

In reality, it is poorly implemented. There are still two different sides to the SCS picture--one that deals with antivirus features, and one that deals with everything else. There are separate user interfaces for these two parts, and they do look and operate differently. Plus, the antivirus features are drawn not from the advanced features that can be found in NAV2003, but in earlier versions of the enterprise model of NAV.

SCS can be installed to run from a central command computer or run individually like the NAV product line. The actual client software installed on each desktop can be as little as 6 MB in its "thin client" configuration. That is the good news. The bad news is that getting everything set up properly will take some careful study as the number of options is hideously complex. Until SCS can catch up with the feature set in NAV 2003, I don't see much of a point in using this software.

My advice to VARs? Try out each program and understand what it does and doesn't do. If you are recommending any of the NAV product line, it makes sense to look at NAV2003 and see if you agree that the improvements make it worth upgrading. You should also determine whether your clients already have some other form of protection from firewalls, intrusion detection systems or other gear outside of the individual desktop. It probably makes sense to keep this protection in place at the "top" of a network hierarchy, or where your corporate network is connected to the outside world. At least, it makes sense until Symantec's software suites improve to where they can be deployed across the enterprise desktops.

NAV 2003 costs $49.95 per desktop retail.

SCS costs $102.60 per node for under 25 nodes, dropping to $46.10 per node for over 2000 nodes. Both are available from www.symantec.com.