New Norton Release Helps Keep PCs Under Control
While many companies may be on the road to Year 2000-readiness on their AS/400s, their PC networks could be huge unmanageable messes. To help manage increasingly decentralized Y2K efforts, Symantec Corp. (Santa Monica, Calif.) announced a new version of Norton 2000 Corporate Edition, which extends its date-scanning and reporting capabilities. Symantec also rolled out tools that plug into Tivoli systems management software, along with other centralized console environments.
Much of the burden for managing Y2K readiness on PC networks is falling back on end-users, says Dana Prussoff, product manager with Symantec. "Given that 92% of companies have missed some Y2K deadline, more responsibility is going back to the end-users again to fix their issues," says Prussoff. The major challenge in the end-user domain is ensuring that Y2K-related errors are not re-introduced into PC networks, she notes. "This increases the need for good reporting tools, to make sure that once things are fixed, they stay fixed."
The latest version of Norton 2000 Corporate Edition (version 2.0), scheduled to ship in late May, includes customizing options for more flexible scanning and reporting. The tool will provide a one-to-five rating scale for severity levels of date problems, as well as provide user names for affected machines.
Since the beginning of the year, Symantec and IBM's Tivoli Systems Inc. (Austin, Tex.) have been shipping Tivoli Manager for Norton 2000, IT Director Edition, as an add-on to Norton 2000. The product, which supports up to 1,000 nodes, centralizes and automates the Year 2000 detection and remediation process onto a single control panel. The system will automatically page or e-mail IT administrators when Symantec Norton 2000 detects a problem exceeding a preset severity level. Tivoli IT Director is a Windows NT-based monitoring station which enables functions including software distribution, inventory management, monitoring, remote control and network management. Along with Tivoli, Norton 2000 also integrates into Norton System Center and Microsoft SMS. "You can use it with any management console you already have," says Prussoff.
Symantec Corp. has also announced efforts to push Norton 2000 into businesses with fewer than 100 seats. Corporate licenses -- which include tech support -- are now available for sites with as few as 10 seats.
Norton 2000 is based on ViaSoft's OnMark 2000 Assess product (www.viasoft.com), which includes a data scanner and conducts risk assessments of hardware and desktop software, including spreadsheets, databases and data files.