MOSS Anti-Virus

Question

Our server already has symantic anti-virus with autoprotect enabled w/ regular scans and updates. I tested it and it does automatically scan uploaded files to document libraries.

My question is, what additional benefit is there to using a specific anti-virus plugin instead of this current setup? There are at least 3 different plugins I can find including one from symantic, avg and microsoft. None of the product descriptions really say what it does although I'm guessing it might add a "scan this file" link inside MOSS.

Answer 1

With MOSS you mean Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server?

Anyhow: the Anti-Virus in your case is signature dependent; what simply means that it recognizes files as infected if they match a signature. I guess the plugins have different feature sets for Macros in documents, or different GUIs... Shouldn't be that big difference.

Answer 2

The reason why you might want a specific SharePoint anti-virus solution is for scanning inside SharePoint lists. For example, traditional virus scanners cannot scan inside document libraries and attachments to list items.

This might be overkill if every user of your MOSS solution has anti-virus on their desktops as these will scan a Word document when it is opened from SharePoint. Even though, there is an argument for having a different vendor's anti-virus product installed on your servers from what is installed on your desktops as extra protection (e.g. one product's scanning heuristics might be a little different or its virus signatures might be older).

You need to weigh up the cost/benefit ratio and ask what importance your company gives to security.