avast! 4 Server Edition offers the most powerful protection to fight virus infections on your server or servers.

It works both as primary protection of a file server itself, and, via its optional plug-ins, as protection for various server subsystems, just like electronic mail or firewall/proxy. Currently, the following plugins (editions) are available:

avast! 4 Server Edition offers the most powerful protection to fight virus infections on your server or servers.

• SMTP Server
• MS Proxy/ISA Server
• MS Exchange Server 2000/2003

· MS Sharepoint Server (both Portal Server 2001/2003 and Windows Sharepoint Services 2003)

These are the main features of this software

Antivirus Kernel

• Experienced users may like another Server Edition feature that is the command-line scanner. The scanning is controlled by many arguments and switches; it is used as a pipe filter, as well a special STDIN/STDOUT mode is available.
• A special avast! feature is the boot-time scan. It is important in the case of suspect that there might be an active virus on the computer. The boot-time scan is performed during the start of the operating system, before the virus can get loaded/activated - thus forbidding the virus from spreading or taking actions to avoid being detected. Command-line Scanner
• Boot-time scan
• The main properties of the Virus Chest are complete isolation from the rest of the operating system.
• The Chest is thought of as a Quarantine area on your disk having special properties that make it a safe isolated place suitable for storing certain files. You can work with the files in the Chest with security restrictions.
• The whole system is protected by asymmetric ciphers and is resistant to unauthorized misuse. Virus Chest
• A special feature of the Server Edition is PUSH updates. It is a dramatic change in the philosophy of updates, usually every installed program checks periodically and when a recent version is available downloads it. PUSH updates however are initialized by our servers; they result in your computer quickly responding and performing the necessary update. The system is based on the SMTP protocol. The updates themselves are controlled by the avast! resident e-mail providers (MS Outlook and Internet Mail).
• If your Internet connection is persistent, the updates are performed completely automatically in fixed time intervals. If you connect to the Internet just occasionally, avast! watches your connection and tries to perform the update when you are online. Push Updates
• Automatic updates are another key point in virus protection, both the virus database and the program itself is updated automatically. The updates are incremental, and just recent data is downloaded, thus cutting down the transfer time. The typical size of a virus database update is approximately of 20-80kb, the program update usually has approximately 200-500kb.
• The recent version supports a number of notification objects, just like sending e-mail messages using SMTP or MAPI (Outlook) Also supported are; SMS as well, notification using the Windows popup mechanism (network message), printing the message on a network printer, SNMP traps, or even sending IM messages using MSN/Windows Messenger. Automatic Updates
• To make work easier, Server Edition contains a special notification manager. Here, you can define notification objects and assort them with antivirus tasks (both resident and on-demand). Those notification objects are used in the case when a virus is found.
• Another feature, closely connected with tasks, is the Scheduler. It makes it possible to schedule the start of a particular task, both one-time and periodically. Notification Manager
• The main principle is so titled "antivirus task" based scanning. First, you define the tasks used to scan for viruses, including the common parameters. Then, you run these tasks (probably periodically). Every task generates some results; of course, you can work with these results afterwards. Resident protection is as well a special type of task.
• Even though the Server Edition contains both the user environments of avast! - simple and enhanced - in server usage usually the enhanced user interface will be employed (except for the terminal server). The enhanced user interface gives you access to all the settings of avast!, thus making it possible to completely configure it for extensive scanning.
• Developed especially to use on Terminal Server, avast! 4 Server Edition contains additional resident modules for e-mail protection (Outlook/Exchange, Internet Mail) and browser protection (Script Blocker). User Interface
• The resident module is highly optimized for speed and tested even in heavy load. It completely utilizes the possibilities of today's powerful servers, just like multiple CPUs (the scanning is parallelized).
• An important recent feature is so-called "semi-silent" mode of operation. The purpose is to correctly display virus warnings on a server system. It works like this: if a request to load an infected file comes from a network, an automatic action is taken and nothing is displayed. On the other hand, when the request comes from a local or terminal session, the usual interactive mode is used - as in desktop antivirus.
• The file system protection guarantees that no virus will be executed on startup, and no virus will be even uploaded to it. The default settings of the resident protection are accommodated to the server environment - it provides thorough scanning. It is possible to adjust the settings to your requirements; you can specify to scan the copied files, or just files with given set of extensions, etc.
• Resident protection that is the real-time protection on the computer, is one of the most important parts of an antivirus program today. avast! features a powerful resident module that is possible to detect the virus before it has any chance to infect your computer.
• avast! 4 Server Edition works perfectly even on IA-64 and AMD-64 based machines. It is one of the very few AV solutions on the market that covers this fast-emerging platform that is likely to gain more and more importance in the upcoming years. Resident Protection
• Special care has been taken to ensure 100% compatibility with advanced server components just like the VSS (volume shadow copy) and FRS (file replication services), guaranteeing that your server will run flawlessly under all circumstances. 64-bit support
• avast! 4 Server Edition has been completely tested with all editions of Windows Servers (starting with NT 4.0 and up to Windows Server 2003, including Windows Storage Server 2003 and Windows Datacenter Server 2003). It is completely optimized to draw advantage from multiple CPUs and has been stress-tested even on machines with a large number of processors to verify exceptional robustness and scalability of its technology.
• The support for the terminals is not limited to the terminal services by Microsoft; it is completely functional with Citrix MetaFrame system as well. Integration with the Operating System
• To set up avast! on terminal environment, you can use another wizard that guides you through the reconfiguration of avast! system for the work in terminal mode. This kind of reconfigured avast! system looks (and behaves) to the terminal users as the standard avast! would for workstations.
• avast! 4 Server Edition is ready to work and even supports large cluster and terminal servers. It contains direct support for cluster setup, including a special wizard that makes the installation on cluster easier.
• The kernel is certified by ICSA and the product frequently takes part in the tests of Virus Bulletin magazine, yielding multiple VB100% awards. Direct Cluster and Terminal Services support
• The latest version of avast! antivirus kernel features world-class detection abilities together with high performance (data throughput). You can expect 100% detection of In-the-Wild viruses and Trojan horses.

· The module is intended to be used in BATCH programs. Its output is the same as the output from the Enhanced User Interface tasks (including the report files).

Limitations of this software

· 60 days trial

What's new in this release

• implemented recent technique of the deletion of locked infected files (now using the boot-time scanner technology)
• Enhanced User Interface: infected items are now marked as red
• removed a limit of maximal length of winpopup alerts (used to be 128 characters)
• temporarily disabled the CHM unpacker
• solved a problem with setting of incorrect access rights to the avast executable files
• improved handling of infected files with exotic filenames
• boot-time scanner: added support for additional archives (GZ, BZIP2, TAR, LHARC, ZOO)
• fixed a bug that was sometimes causing very slow scanning of CAB archives
• transition to recent data storage - avast doesn't need the ODBC/Jet drivers anymore and should therefore work better even under older versions of Windows (NT4)
• Standard Shield: improved compatibility with Microsoft Office (particularly, saving of Excel documents on network shares)
• further improved Standard Shield speed under Windows XP (generally, less files are scanned)
• Standard Shield: by default, system DLLs are not scanned anymore (speed optimization)
• solved a rare problem that could eventually cause even a crash of the OS during boot (Windows 2003)
• fixed the Program Settings menu item in the avast tray icon menu
• fixed incorrect statistics in sessions of scheduled tasks
• improvements in executable packers (most notably, added ASProtect and MoleBox unpackers)

· avast! Server Edition should now work flawlessly with Windows Windows Longhorn Server beta 2 and higher...