eScan 2003 Corporate Edition

eScan 2003 Corporate Edition for Windows works to protect your system from viruses and Trojans that come in from e-mail or while surfing the Internet. Not only this, you get a host of content-security features, which include blocking spam and pop-ads, website-access control and remote file access control over a Windows network.

Anti-virus



The first thing that you would do after installing an anti-virus software is download its update. This can be easily done via HTTP or FTP by selecting the update option from the software’s menu. You can set options to automatically update the software at a fixed frequency or choose to do it manually. The software has options to perform heuristic analysis, which allows protection from unknown viruses by looking for unusual sequence, pattern or content. This is a nice feature though not unique to eScan. Similarly, like other anti-virus software, upon detection of viruses, you get options to remove the virus, delete the file or quarantine the file. In our tests the software detected all the viruses, including those inside zip files. However, it didn’t quarantine viruses in the zipped files and requested an extraction. Other anti-virus software like Norton can quarantine virus infected zip files.

The software has been created in association with the German anti-virus maker GData Security using anti-virus technology from Kaspersky Labs and makes use of the Microworld Winsock Layer which the company claims sits above the Microsoft Winsock layer and scans all incoming and outgoing HTTP, FTP, SMTP and POP3 requests before they affect the system’s resources. This makes sure your system does not come into contact with potentially harmful content. This can be useful against script viruses embedded in HTML pages. We tested the software against other anti-virus softwares and found that it indeed traps viruses before any of the other softwares do. eScan terminated the download of a potentially malicious zipped virus file whereas another anti-virus software detected the virus only after the file was extracted.

Other nice features include the ability to schedule your disk scanning by creating an e-Scan job. You can also monitor jobs and choose to see records of past anti-virus scans in a neat and easy-to-use GUI.

Some of eScan 2003’s features include blocking spam and pop-up ads, website access control and remote-file access control

Content security



The content-security options block attachments with particular extensions specified by the user, in addition to its own list including extensions like .CHM, .COM, .EXE, .JD and .PIF. You can also compress or decompress attachments that you send or receive by default. Also you can quarantine or delete e-mail based on certain words or phrases. Similarly you can also block access to web pages containing some words or phrases. Another useful feature is that you can block those annoying pop-up ads that show up every now and then while you’re surfing. All these features work well and are useful. Furthermore, you can clean up your browser’s cache, cookies and ActiveX plug-ins as well from this console.

Remote management



The corporate edition of the software has a remote management option through which you can install and manage the anti-virus software on machines on your network. This is a very useful feature indeed. While installing the Corporate Edition of eScan, you can choose to set your machine as the server. This will install the eServ eScan server on your system and will give you access to the Management Console from where you can install there software on client machine on your network as well as perform routine scans on them.

The Bottom Line The software has useful well-organized features in addition to effective virus-control that can help you get the most out of your connectivity without having to deal with malicious/offensive content.

The various versions of eScan are eScan Virus Control, Pro Edition, Internet Security Suite and Corporate Edition and Enterprise Edition. Prices range from Rs 2,277 for a single user Virus Control edition to Rs 14,745 for a 5-user Corporate Edition package. A 5-9 user for the license for the Corporate Edition can be obtained for Rs 2,798 per license.

S N A P S H O T
Price	:	Rs 14,745 for five-user Corporate Edition (one-year warranty and renewable 45% of the cost of the product later)
Meant for	:	SMEs
Key specs	:	Anti-virus, content filtering, remote management
Pros	:	Traps viruses before they reach the system through MWL
Cons	:	Can’t quarantine viruses in zipped files
Contact	:	MicroWorld, Mumbai.
Tel	:	28265701.
E-mail	:	rajiv@mspl.net

Shruti Pareek