Quick link to download – http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ OR http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/?mkt=en-us
Overview
Security Essentials will replace your paid anti virus software. This is GREAT news for the computer industry. Why? Because by having antivirus companies charge to solve a problem put the relationship of cash and virus’ in bed with each other.
This meant that people were paying for virus’ to be written and then people were getting paid to reverse engineer these virus’. Now the virus writers are up against a whole OS and a company that has more profit than many companies have GDP.
Quick review
Download is painless and easy, once verification is completed the software downloads its own updates and begins scanning your computer. Very few clicks are required. The whole process takes about 1 minute of your time then your scan will take as much time as it needs to complete the job.
The proof will be in the pudding, by Microsoft releasing this they have really taken on a big challenge. It shows that microsoft are as willing as ever to provide what the huddled masses need.
And for education?
The impact on education is questionable. This AV client is not an enterprise product and not centrally monitored or managed so it is unlikely it will replace other AV client/server solutions.
How cool would it be if you could assign a workstation to an organization using SAML or a federated log on and get update/virus status and/or push out software?
If centralized management or some sort of auditing/reporting became available then it would replace the enterprise products at a saving of £500 on average per school (deployment costs taken into account), that’s about £8,000,000 (£8 million) across the whole of England! Nice!
And to Microsoft..
Microsoft, if you are listening… Think about some sort of central monitoring,reporting, updating system that works with a federated login such as shibboleth or something, please!
UPDATE – I just came to give a link to this and it appears that microsoft has removed the product.. No idea what’s going on there.. I get a 404 – We are sorry, the page you……
Here is the link for when they put it back online! http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
It appears that the UK site may be down.. You can always use the US link..