Labs

Although not that well known in the anti-virus market, Panda Software is gaining plenty of respect with a range of products that offers extremely good value. Its Antivirus Enterprise Suite is no exception - it comes packed with features, including Panda's PerimeterScan utility for firewall and proxy servers, plus excellent mail server support.

The action starts at the central Administrator console, which is designed to deploy and manage all the anti-virus components. Installation is swift, although some areas of the manual are confusing. It indicates that the console can run on Windows 9x and ME systems, whereas this is only applicable to systems that have the Novell Client installed and are managing NetWare servers only. The online help is also unfinished and offers no search facilities.

All available servers are displayed

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in the main window, with another to the right for workstations, and the views can be swiftly customised to show only specific operating systems. Servers may have the anti-virus components deployed immediately, but workstations will only appear once they have the software installed. These are loaded as packages for each required OS and can be deployed either by a login script for Windows domain members or by running the RINSTALL utility locally from a network share for workgroup members.

The console allows global parameters to be applied, so you're able to decide what parts, if any, of the local AntiVirus Platinum software users are allowed to play with. It's also possible to spread the management load over a number of servers, as each will look after associated workstations and manage their scan settings.

Signature updates are easily downloaded and the process can be scheduled, although Panda Software only updates its website once a day. Clients are set up to contact their management server at regular intervals to check for and retrieve any new files. Panda had no problems in blocking our virus attacks, but we found its responses were limited. When a virus is spotted, the Panda icon next to the relevant group turns red, but notification options are among the weakest here. Panda can only deliver a network message to one system or an email warning to a single recipient in the event of a positive detection.