Panda Managed Office Protection Review

I have never been able to say with any conviction that panda software is of any use, to anybody, and unfortunately this new software has not changed my mind.

First of all Panda has it branded as business software, but just quickly mentions it works on windows home server.

Second, there are very little settings you can control.

Lastly, it is controlled solely from an online control panel, which can be seen as good or bad thing.

Once you have bought the software it directs you to an online control panel, this is once you have received your confirmation email. There is a section that says “installation and settings” this looks like a good place to head for now.

Once there you can download a small application. At this point you have no idea whether you install this on the machine you have downloaded it too or the send it over to your WHS via the software share. I just want to point the online installation guide has no mention at all about Windows Home Server, nothing, not even a reference, if you search the online manual for windows home server it says no topics found and that is the same for WHS.

Call it in intuition, but I gathered that I would need to install the file I have downloaded on my WHS, so that I did. There are 2 next screens with little information on them and then that is it, the installation then just randomly closes, and again I am left wondering what I am supposed to do next.

I noticed the panda icon in the system tray and upon opening it I am presented with the below.

Ok so I gathered it wasn’t finished and waited for 20 minutes for it to finish, once it has finished it displayed a firewall status.

I went back to the online control panel and clicked on computers and there it was with status ok, I can click on the machine to see what protection is enabled, but nowhere does it give me the chance to make settings changes.

I looked in the incomprehensive manual, to find that there are some limited changes you can make to the firewall and anti-virus but nothing such as exclusions, but worst of all these changes can only be made to groups that you place your machines into. This means there is no singular control over any individual machine.

So I have found out that the software isn’t easy to install, the manual is none existent and there are limited things I can control on each machine. So I thought I would take a look at the remote admin installer to see if that can win it some browning points, unfortunately again I shouldn’t have, you can see below what I saw after install.

Initial tests of the remote installer isn’t good, its inconsistent most of the time, it is a struggle to get it to work without changing some settings in the windows firewall on the local machine, which completely defeats the object of remote installer.

There is no integration with the WHS console but this we can forgive as there aren’t many anti-virus programs that do this, maybe in the future this is an improvement that can be made.

Conclusion

I am sorry this review has been so negative, but it is very hard to see anything worth buying in this software. You can have this software for a staggering £62.10 per license for 1 year, when you compare that with AVG Business Edition 9.0 which costs £23.79 per license for 1 year, which is an unbelievable deference. Not only that, AVG actually works! And works well!

Some people might find this software really easy to use once installed, and that is the magic words “once setup”. Being able to view the status of your anti-virus remotely might be useful for some, but what’s the point when WHS does that for you.

I want to point out that this review is not a reflection of the performance of the software but the usability and how maintainable the software really is. Maybe this software is great at catching viruses and Trojans, I truly hope that it is, because that would be at least one thing it can say it does well.

If you want my advice go with AVG Business Edition 9.0, I will try and bring you a review of this as and when I can.

Matthew Glover
www.matthewglover.co.uk

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