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avast! Exchange Server Edition (Plug-in)

The avast! 4 Exchange Server Edtion provides unrivalled, exemplary protection for Microsoft Exchange 2000 and 2003 Servers. It features high-performance scanning, copacetic scalability and support for clustering (even in active-active mode), furthermore, it perfectly integrates with Exchange via Microsoft‘s own Virus Scanning APIs, and henceforth providing a vital piece of software.

The product works as a plug-in for avast! Server Edition. Therefore, it uses the same high-performance, award-winning, ICSA-certified engine as the Server Editon itself, providing you with paramount protection.

This product also makes use of a related product, avast! SMTP Server Edition. That is, avast! SMTP Server Edition is an integral part of avast! Exchange Server Edition and is used to scan all SMTP traffic on Exchange servers.

Real-time Scanning

Real-time scanning for viruses is the most important job of every antivirus solution deployed on Exchange servers, and avast! Exchange Server Edition makes no exception to this rule. Thanks to tight integration with the Exchange itself, avast! is able to detect and remove viruses from both inbound and outbound messages. Regardless of how a message gets to/from the server - be it SMTP, MAPI, NNTP, IMAPI, POP, Outlook Web access (HTTP) or any other way - you can be confident that it will be properly screened and disinfected before it reaches the recipient. Of course, the scanning is not confined to mailbox stores - public folder stores are monitored as well.
New for Exchange 2003, is the ability to operate at the transport level - meaning that all items will be properly scanned even if deployed on a gateway/border server that just passes the mails through, without saving them to an information store.

Proactive and Background Scanning

Besides real-time scanning, avast! offers further scanning options to ensure that your server is virus-free under all circumstances.

Proactive scanning means that whenever a message is submitted to the Exchange store, either by way of a client or a transport agent, it is placed in the global scanning queue with a low priority. If and when there are threads available in the thread pool and no high-priority item remains to be scanned, each item with a low priority is submitted for scanning.
Using the Background scanning scanning option will cause the information store to generate one thread per database, running at BelowNormal priority, to perform background scanning of all the messages and attachments. It is activated whenever either the MDB is mounted (including during information store startup) or when a new virus database update is loaded/installed. Once the background scanning is completed, the thread sleeps until one of the above scenarios is encountered again.

High Scalability

avast! Exchange Server Edition is easily deployable and works perfectly even on large datacenter servers and cluster servers (including the active-active mode). The scanning engine was designed with two basic goals in mind, those being performance and stability. It‘s able to take advantage of multiple CPUs, fully utilizing the potential of today‘s advanced server hardware. Supplementary, it supports scanning in memory (including the decompression of archives / packed files), resulting in unrivaled scanning speed and robustness.

Integrated Virus Cleaner

Since version 4.1, avast! professional includes a seperate product called ‘Virus Cleaner‘. This is a tool designed for the complete removal of the most common infections from already-infected computers. So now avast! is capable of reliably healing, and not just detecting, the most common malware. The number of viruses and worms supported by the Virus Cleaner is constantly growing to offer customers the best possible healing power. For emergency purposes, we also offer ‘Virus Cleaner‘ as a standalone product, capable of running without installing avast!.

Attachment Blocking

avast!, Exchange Server Edition also contains a simple attachment blocker. You can specify file name masks (such as *.pif or Love*.vbs) of attachments that will be stripped from all inbound and outbound messages. This is a very simple yet extremely powerful weapon to effectively fight against a number of both known and yet-uknown malware.

Alerting and Logging

As with any server-side software, it is very important to provide an effective means of monitoring. For this purpose, avast! offers a wide range of analysis possibilities. These include, thorough notification capabilities via e-mail and avast‘s built-in Notification Manager (that supports a number of other transport protocols), rich logging features, and performance counters.

The e-mail notifications are „intelligent“ by means of predefined limits (to avoid flooding of the server with avast‘s own messages), and also in the fact that they are only being sent to respective message senders if these are really the originators of the infected mail (i.e. if the From: fields of the message have not been forged).

Automatic Updates

The Exchange Server Edition uses the identical updating modules as avast! Server Edition itself, resulting in unparalled speed and size of updates. The updates can be either installed automatically by the updater, or manually. It is also possible to set the system up so that the updater first asks the administrator prior to installing any updates.
The Exchange module also recognizes the avast! PUSH iAVS messages. Therefore, the avast‘s unique PUSH iAVS feature is fully compatible with the Exchange Server Edition, with no additional modifications of settings required.