McAfee Thins Down VirusScan

Lightweight antivirus program protects remote workers accessing corporate networks.

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

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Called McAfee VirusScan TC (for "thin client"), the program will be priced at $49 per year for 25 clients or fewer, and $28 per year for 26 to 500 clients, McAfee officials say. It is scheduled to become available October 16, and will be announced at the Networld-Interop networking trade show, which kicks off September 25 in Atlanta, according to Ryan McGee, a product marketing manager for McAfee.

VirusScan TC is about 3MB in size, or one-fifth the size of McAfee's standard VirusScan desktop product. That should make it less of a headache for remote workers to download over a narrow-bandwidth phone line, McGee says.

Essentials Only

"We basically went through the code and stripped away all the bells and whistles that some customers had told us they considered redundant or unnecessary," McGee says.

For example, VirusScan TC removes a feature that scans e-mails for viruses before they are opened. That feature was considered expendable, since most corporations already use antivirus software at the gateway or the groupware level to scan e-mails before they are sent to users, McGee says. VirusScan TC does still scan e-mails for viruses when they are moved about on the desktop and after they are opened, he adds.

The software also does away with the end-user interface. Besides helping to reduce the size of the program, this also stops workers from reconfiguring or disabling their antivirus software, which can cause extra work for IT departments, McGee says.

The software will appeal most to companies using version 4.03 of McAfee's software, or a version released prior to that, he says. That's because older versions of McAfee's product require users to download the entire directory of virus definitions each time a new virus emerges, which can take what seems like a lifetime over a dial-up connection.

The latest release of VirusScan, version 4.5, which was launched in January, allows users to update their virus definitions incrementally, so companies using that product may have less incentive to update their remote workers to VirusScan TC. By switching to the thin-client product, however, IS departments would still benefit from the fact that VirusScan TC omits the end-user interface, McGee notes.

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