Microsoft OneCare For Small Business?
June 13th, 2006
Should Windows Live OneCare be used in a Small Business Server environment?
As Microsoft has now released the production release of Windows OneCare you may be wondering whether or not it is appropriate to use as a tool for Small Businesses. The answer, as is usually the case where small businesses are concerned is, it depends.
First a quick product overview. As this article isn’t meant as a full product review I’ll simply provide the feature summary of OneCare and a couple of comments. OneCare includes firewall, antivirus and backup software, as well as Microsoft’s Windows Defender antispyware technology, which is still in beta form. The product also handles routine maintenance tasks such as defragmenting the hard disk and cleaning up unused temporary files. You should note that in regards to the maintenance tasks such as backup, disk cleanup, and defragmentation that these aren’t really new features for your XP machine. They already exist, you are just most likely not using them.
The real benefit is that this functionality is compiled into an inclusive application that can automate most of those tasks for you with a simple to use interface. Microsoft is selling OneCare subscriptions under a novel pricing plan of $49.95 per year for three users (different computers), which is designed to simplify things for home users. As of this writing you can expect to find deals for much less than that through various retailers as Microsoft works with the channel to refine its marketing push. There was a recent promotion at Circuit City for $9.99 (expired) which was by far the cheapest I’ve seen, but at the moment you can still pick up from Amazon for $19.99. That’s the same discounted price that Microsoft offered to those that had assisted in beta testing the product.
So basically 3 computers covered for Antivirus, Malware, etc for $20. Sounds good to me.
For home users we definitely recommend the product, namely for its comprehensive coverage of the most common security related issues as compared to other vendors and its nearly silent and less annoying background operations. If you are a power user who likes to tweak every aspect of your systems however you will likely be happier using best-in-class products for each security category as you’ll be able to have granular control over most aspects of the software. For that type of user we recommend Eset’s NOD32 or Kaspersky. They are hands down the best anti-virus products out there when it comes to speed and detection, but not nearly as easy to use or as comprehensive as OneCare.
Outside of the all-inclusive approach of providing system tuning and backup tools here are the main items we consider the biggest competitive differentiators at the moment that provide true value:
- While a subscription model for obtaining the latest virus and Malware updates is nothing new to security products, Microsoft is the only vendor so far that also includes product updates as well as a part of the subscription. With a competitive product from Symantec for example you would currently have to go out and buy the new product.
- Microsoft also one-upped the competition, and itself for that matter, by taking the unprecedented move of supporting all OneCare customers via their choice of telephone, online chat, or email.
But what about the small business owner? That price point and feature set sounds pretty good for covering three machines, and if the coverage is good wouldn’t that make a lot of sense? Again, it depends. If you are a very small business still running a peer to peer environment without a centralized server then I’d certainly say go for it and you can stop reading here. If you are running Small Business Server however and have more than ten or so machines, or are a startup planning on high growth, then there are other factors we need to examine…
First and foremost, is it even compatible with your computers? Well, it requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (or Vista when it releases). In a Small Business Server domain environment, what about conflicts with the domain or installation rights? We couldn’t find a comprehensive answer from Microsoft on those latter questions other than the following general statement:
Q: Can I use OneCare with Microsoft Small Business Server?
A: Windows Live OneCare is not designed to work with Small Business Server; however, you can use OneCare on the desktop’s and laptops within a network that uses Small Business Server.
That sounds straightforward enough but there are so many areas that a product like this could conflict with the domain that it left us hesitant to say you could use it painlessly without actually checking it all out…..so we set everything up in our test lab. Guess what? It ran just fine and without conflicts, even in the areas we were most worried about such as Group Policy firewall settings, etc. That said, please don’t try and run it on the server ok?
So, now that we’re confident it works we can move on to the other issues, or rather take into account the downside of using any product like this which is targeted predominantly at personal installations vs. corporate.
- Centralized Management: Obviously you will not have any centralized management tools built in for deployment, updates, subscription/license management, reporting tools, or administrative scans. This becomes progressively more important based upon the number of machines you have or your expected growth rate so weight this factor as appropriate for your organization.
- Redundancy/Conflicts: Some of the functionality built into OneCare will likely overlap existing functions you may have in place. Namely client pc backups, firewall settings, or WSUS if you have it localized. It’s important that you take the overlapping functions into account if you use the product and disable one of the redundant pieces of software or incorporate into your management plan.
- Long term planning: With Microsoft structuring existing and new products into a business security package called ForeFront I wouldn’t hold my breath for a variant of OneCare to be released just for SBS. So, even if you may be a very small business today, if you have growth plans that significantly increase your size in the next 12 months you may want to consider a centralized solution instead of OneCare.
- Control: One of the benefits of OneCare for a home user is that it does most of its magic in the background automatically without bothering you every 5 minutes. To accomplish this however it necessarily makes a lot of assumptions, something you may want more control over as a business. Basically, if you have someone internally or externally tasked with regularly managing your IT services then you may not be a great candidate since most IT personnel would balk at their inability to control product and content updates (and rightfully so as seemingly benign updates have been known to break other software or features, so we tend to test major updates prior to releasing them for full deployment….)
- Email Anti-Spam: This is the only real shortcoming of the product in our opinion. I was frankly a bit surprised to see this missing. Granted, if you are using Outlook you have some very basic coverage such as its Junk Mail features. If you are not running Small Business Server with Exchange then insure that your ISP’s email system provides hearty anti-spam functionality. If you are running Exchange server then we highly recommend supplementing the server with a product such as GFI’s outstanding Mail Essentials product. This is on our “Must Have” list of software anyway therefore we don’t consider it a massive blow to OneCare but just be aware of this.
- Timing: As this product is newly released its entry into the market has shaken up security vendors such as Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc., which are now scrambling to deliver security products that have the same backup and PC tuning features as their new competitor. Symantec expects to ship a OneCare competitor, Norton 360 (previously code named Genesis), by year’s end. McAfee said it would deliver its own backup and security product, code-named Falcon, by September. A beta version of Falcon is expected any day now. The reason this matters to you is one of these products may well address some of the features above we’d like to see in a Small Business variant. So if you don’t have to make an immediate decision we’d recommend letting this market shake out a bit first to see what your options may be. In addition there are additional features in some of the competitor product plans that might be useful to you, namely an option to backup online to a hosted offsite server. In response to that Microsoft has stated they are also examining offering that as a future feature.
Our conclusions? We tend to caveat everything in the small business space since there is rarely a “one-size fits all” answer for that audience. But since we know you want straightforward answers we’ll give it a shot.
- Peer-To-Peer environment: Recommended
- Small Business Server < 15 Users (Onsite): Recommended
- Small Business Server > 15 Users (Onsite): Not Recommended
- *For environments with greater than 15 users, but the majority of whom operate remotely out of home office environments we would recommend the product deployed on those machines and use the same rules above for the onsite machines.
Cheers,
Matt Ridings
MSR Consulting
Related Links:
Vista Note: A beta program designed to test the upcoming Windows Vista version of the software will start up later in the year. Windows Vista is expected to ship in early 2007, and OneCare for Vista will be available around the same time
Entry Filed under: Small Business Server, Security, Consulting
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