Installation of this product requires the use of either SQL Server or the Microsoft Desktop Engine on the local machine or elsewhere on the network. In practice, this means a long wait for all the elements to be installed on the admin machine.
Once that has been done, the console can be fired up. This runs as a snap-in under the Microsoft Management Console, effectively meaning that it can only be run under Windows.
This minor criticism aside, the console is easy to get to grips with and, on first look, provides the user with several options to install and maintain workstations and servers on the network.
The console is divided up into two sections, with a tree view of the logical network on the left and the main screen on the right. One of the first tasks with any deployment is to set up administrators and administration groups responsible for rolling out anti-virus measures on the network.
Next, we tested the remote install capabilities of the product. The software was very good at finding the computers on our test network and with a few clicks we were able to install anti-virus applications very easily via the remote agent install. Again, the whole process proved to be fairly painless.
We also found it easy to roll out anti-virus policies on to target machines. Policies can be modeled on a range of different templates, based on the target machine’s function.
You can also specify the level of protection – recommended, maximum or high-speed. There does not appear to be any further granularity, however, other than a few advanced options, such as scanning at boot-up and investigating additional NTFS streams.
As usual with Kaspersky, the reporting tools are second-to-none. Again, with a few clicks, the tool generates reports on a variety of different metrics and the data is presented in html format, so is easily accessible to anyone with a browser.
