With NOD32 Enterprise Edition, Eset Software has a solid product that offers a real alternative to some of the more established players in the market.
Installation went as smoothly as any of the products on review, and we were impressed by the clear, simple layout of the interface.
All the relevant and essential antivirus functionality is included with NOD32 – a memory-resident monitor takes responsibility for real time file scanning, and will lock down infected files, while SMTP traffic can be scanned as it enters the network or on demand.
While Eset has primarily targeted its software at a Windows environment, with support for all platforms from Win95, there are also modules that can operate on Dos, Linux and Novell machines. Several email servers are also supported, including Exchange and Domino, in addition to various Linux-based mail servers.
The Remote Administration console allows you to manage your network of workstations, install NOD32 software on clients and so on. You can also create policies that can be pushed out to nodes on the network with NOD32 installed.
Another useful feature of NOD32 is that it will automatically search your network looking for potential security holes. Of course, managing your network is only part of the job, and Eset allows both automatic and custom report generation, meaning we could fine-tune the types of reports we wanted to study to our own specific needs.
We were particularly impressed with the NOD32 management console and Remote Administration console. Both use simple tree directories, which makes navigation a cinch. It is nicely laid out, and while this is not particularly important, it looks good too.
There is comprehensive customer support via the internet and a telephone hotline. Just one minor gripe was with the written documentation, and that provided on CD. Both seemed a little thin in terms of information, and seemed to concentrate on the installation procedure more than anything else.
