Labs

Command's anti-virus offering has seen a substantial spring clean this year, bringing in some long-awaited new features. Gone are the dusty help files that referred to the old F-Prot Professional utility on which AntiVirus was originally based, to be replaced by a CommandCentral utility that offers administrators some useful deployment tools.

One feature conspicuous by its absence is a management console, so once the software has been installed to your clients there are no tools for monitoring its progress. At the time of writing, Command was about to unveil its TotalCommand management tool, but this is aimed primarily at large enterprises and wasn't made available to us for review.

Even so, client deployment options are extensive, as CommandCentral allows you to create an MSI (Microsoft Installer) file where you can decide what components are installed and the settings for

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each function, whether users are able to scan local and network drives, and include predefined custom scan jobs. It then runs a full discovery scan of the network, so you can select the systems on which you want the Command agent installed. This lets clients run the central Anti-Virus installation routine either from a logon script or locally from the Run line.

Definition updates may be downloaded directly from the AntiVirus user interface or managed by CommandCentral. For the latter, you select a Command site, choose from definition files, component updates and upgrades and schedule the task to run at regular intervals. Note that this feature isn't compatible with proxy authentication, which must be disabled on the download system. The resultant files are then applied to the administrative installation points. The AntiVirus software contains an agent that checks the central image file for changes at logon and will automatically download any new files or modifications.

The local AntiVirus utility provides a comparatively basic interface, but does allow a variety of tasks to be carried out if the user has been granted permission. They can run on-demand and scheduled scans of their drives, allow scans to start after a specific period of inactivity and create a rescue disk set. However, without a central management console, there are few alerting options. AntiVirus can only create a local report, display a warning message or send an email to a single recipient.