Support Site Woes

in Applications

Over the past week, I’ve been creating an internal Exchange best practice/check list document so that we can standardise on how we configure Exchange servers for our clients. This document includes a number of items including information on configuring AV scanners to exclude certain Exchange folders. I thought it best to provide the reader of this document direct links to knowledgebase articles on various AV products. I attempted to cover the following vendors:

  • Symantec;
  • Sophos;
  • McAfee;
  • Trend Micro; and
  • CA

Now finding this information was harder than I thought, the steps taken to find the relevant articles was not straightforward. First I had to find out the current product versions (I still can’t find a product version number for the Trend Micro AV), then I used each support site to search for the terms ‘exchange’ and ‘mdbdata’. I used these terms because I knew that the \mdbdata folder is one of the folders to exclude. Here are the steps taken to find each document for each vendor. As you can see some are easier to find than others.

Symantec

Sophos

McAfee

Trend Micro

CA

  • Browse to http://www.cai.com
  • Click ‘Support’
  • Click ‘Technical Support’
  • Click ‘SupportConnect’
  • Click ‘Knowledge Base’
  • Search for ‘exchange mdbdata’
  • Hmmm.. two documents, nothing about Exchange and AV
  • Click ‘Knowledge Base’
  • Search for ‘exchange antivirus’
  • Hmmm.. Go through 3 pages of results with nothing related to my search
  • Click ‘Published Solutions’
  • Select ‘eTrust Antivirus All User versions Multi-platform’
  • Select ‘Release: 7.1″
  • Select ‘Operating System: WIN2003’
  • Click ‘Search’
  • Grrrr.. ‘No solutions were found that match your search criteria’
  • Click ‘Toolbox’
  • Arrghh.. Nothing
  • CA, you suck!
  • Browse to http://www.symantec.com
    Score: 0/10