Talk:Computer Associates eTrust

From Gripe Wiki

I will try to kick this discussion off by saying that last year I moved from Symantec Corporate antiVirus to Computer Associates for my Small Business Server clients. After having numerous issues with Symantec that significantly increased my cost for client support, I spoke with CA representatives at several industry events. Once I tried their eTrust product, I decided to make the switch.

There were fours things that drew me to this product. One, it was very competitively priced with other solutions and it was deployed in 95% of the Fortune 500 companies. Two, it uses two scanning engines instead of one. This allows me to deploy opposing scanning engines on the server and the clients, both for real-time scans and scheduled scans. Third, it is based on very tight code that does not slow the systems down as it goes about the work of scanning for viruses. I had been experiencing very noticeable speed issues with Symantec with each new version they created. Four, CA updates its virus definitions as soon as they have something new so there is very little lag time before those protections are availble to my clients. Combined with flawless definition downloads, I feel that my clients are now far better off than they were when I used Symantec products.

Side note to Ed - Thanks for taking a chance on this wiki experiment. I hope that it works well beyond your wildest imaginings.

Bob N.

I used this AV program for several years and liked it, and had no problem with it on my WinME laptop. With about 6 weeks left on my subscription, I downloaded their latest version, and it wouldn't work: it just ran and ran and ran. Once I let it run overnight and it still wouldn't finish. (I even tried uninstalling, downloading again, and reinstalling with the same results.) I got no help from the company to either fix the problem or to get the prior version back. While they continued to ignore my emails, they did send me numerous emails to renew my subscription. Others with WinME reported no problem with the newest version, according to a few postings at Computing.net. Anyway, I lost out on more than 10% of my paid subscription, and the company lost out on my renewal.

—Renaissance Man

I am a home user of eTrust and I like it. CA brought a company called VET from Australia serveral years ago and intergrated that product into eTrust. At work I used VET for many years. VET is very fast and relieable. I liked the fact that they are almost a day ahead of us. I always had new antivirus signature files from VET before they would showup from Norton. Another good thing about eTrust and VET is the price.

Dave D.

I suggest this to all of my small business clients (the corp. version). Since they don't have to renew a subscription every year it really reduces the cost of ownership. Additionally, you can call CA and tell them you are switching from another A/V product and they will set you up with upgrade pricing that cuts the cost nearly in half. I have several clients running it on roughly 150 machines for the last 3 years with not a single infection. If anyone has ever dealt with Symantec's live update they will really appreciate CA's simple but effective update mechanism that just works every time.

Most of my experience is on v.7.1 and there is one caveat. It takes some reading to learn how it works and how to configure it correctly for network wide deployment. The default settings are just bad, but they can be changed and the changes included in the install process for the clients. Once it has been installed it is something that is easily forgotten since it stays out of the way until it detects a virus.

W.B.