Symantec's AntiVirus 10 Deployment Woes?

loraksus asks: "We recently deployed Symantec AV Corporate version 10 across on our network and have been having nothing but problems. The new client breaks the MS Office install and causes machines to slow down significantly - some almost to the point of being completely unusable. The client (doscan.exe) also crashes very frequently (daily), and tends to take other things down with it. Symantec's 'workaround' is to drop by every workstation and insert the Office (or Wordperfect, it screws up both applications) CD, remove some office shortcuts and disable some virus scans. Since we manage clients over WAN links hundreds of miles away, this really isn't an option, nor is it an acceptable option given the number of workstations we manage. Are there any other admins dealing with this? Any advice? Solutions?" "It seems that more and more closed source companies are now rushing software out the door that not only has a couple bugs, but glaring errors that would have easily been caught in even the most basic testing. Of course, we in IT usually have no recourse against these companies other than never buying their products, again.

Do you folks have any advice when it comes to dealing vendors who release software that is unusuable and can't provide an acceptable resolution?"

Comments

Re:pain

[G-Licious!]

Even though I'm really all for the projects you mentioned, if I had any modpoints left, I'd mod you down.

He's managing systems across a WAN, it should be obvious that that's even less a solution than Synaptic suggested.

I do like to get one point across, though: all those virus scanners, malware removers, and lots of other Windows 'toys' have all this unnecessary cruft around them. They all have a different look and feel, or even a theming system people really don't care about when they use them. There's only a handful of applications I'd apply a theming system too; I even consider Winamp a questionable case.

This just seems like waste, the money invested in the programming and design for such an interface could probably have been spend on reaching the goals the application was actually made for, or fixing stupid bugs. You can have a friendly interface using Windows' native look. If the user wants eyecandy, get him to use WindowBlinds or something.

I hope I don't get to see any of this on my favourite OS anytime soon..

No incentive to make decent AV-ware

[mabu]

The legacy that Microsoft created, of bundling free software with other core products has scared away many good software developers from wanting to compete in this and other arenas. So just a few who have managed to stay alive because they got started early (Symantec and McAffee) are still around, but there's really not much incentive for them to make their products solid -- I suspect most of these companies are outsourcing programming to India anyway, and their products are so compartmentalized for the purpose of managing big, cheap programming teams, this results in crappy software.

Symantec relies on a mafia-subscription-type structure, and software so complicated and bad, that un-installing it in many cases isn't an option unless you want to have to re-format your hard drive. That's their business model. It's not based around producing a really excellent product.

This is one of those scenarios where the "competition" has become so lazy, it's almost desirable for Microsoft to put the final nail in the coffin and put them out of business. Their products couldn't be any worse than Microsoft's versions, and at least we'd probably have better work-arounds with bugs.

Testing

[RabidMonkey]

As much as everyone hates testing, this is one thing that should have been caught in QA before the patch/update was released. Come on - you just dropped a major version into how many machines? You mean you didn't catch something like frequent crashes and office breaking in your QA Cycle? In your pilot?

As much as I hate doing QA and Pilots, they work. For little stuff, screw change management and just change it. But for something like a major release or update, you need to do some testing before you dump the code out to users.

It just makes sense in a CYA way, and makes the weekends yours again.