… in order to “save” money.
Once had a customer whinge about the cost of implementing an anti-spyware solution.
Someone told them that Spybot S&D was free.
Technically it was, as I told them, if you didn’t mind the fact that all of your 10,000 PCs would all want to download updates from the internet.
“Oh”, said the customer.
They ended up negotiating a corporate Spybot license, which gave them the option to set up a deployment server inside their network.
Given corporate memory being what it is, I expect some customer bozo will ask us to deploy Microsoft’s anti-virus solution when it is released.
There is, of course, four problems with that:
- it’s probably not going to be licensed so you can’t do that legitimately.
- it’s not integrated with System Center, so no corporate reporting or deployment points.
- cannot be managed by Group Policy.
- can’t be integrated with Network Access Protection.
I don’t blame Microsoft for having those limitations.
After all, they’ll have a corporate product which will do that. It’s called Forefront Client Security.