Perhaps someone from Alwil technical support can help me here.
Here’s a little background. I work for a small IT contracting company that provides support several hundred client machines in our city area. We discovered Avast about a year ago and have loved it since. It is now our most highly recommended anti-virus software. We recommend it to all of our clients and would like to continue doing so.
Last week, Avast version 5 became available which is great! The software works wonderfully. So I wanted to check and make sure it would work with ADNM for our clients. So I browsed to the ADNM portion of the Avast site.
avast! Distributed Network Manager (ADNM) is free of charge. That means that any owner of avast! antivirus licenses (at least 2 licenses of avast! Professional or 1 Server Edition - except avast! for Linux) is eligible to use ADNM.
I read through all the pages and saw no reference to versions except the line about that said ANY Avast Antivirus license would work. So we purchased 30 licenses of Avast! Professional. We received our license for our 30 client machines running Avast. I then tried to incorporate this license with our ADNM installation and to my dismay it’s compatible with ADNM.
I find this highly deceptive advertising for Avast! 5 and ADNM. The central management server really is the deal breaker and a must have for our anti-virus needs. I really would like to continue using Avast! and ADNM, but how am I supposed to come back to the client and tell them we need to:
Process a refund on our purchase
Purchase Avast! 4.8 licenses that actually cost considerably more than the Avast! 5 licenses.
I can foresee the client being VERY unhappy about this issue and I’d like to resolve this for them before going the alternate and unpleasant route. I’d really hate to turn the client back and explain to them the unfortunate advertising listed above.
Has anyone else had this issue?
Can Alwil tech support assist me further with this issue?
Can I force the license to work with ADNM?
its kinda logical that Avast 5 doesnt work in this version of ADNM, you could have seen that from several threads asking for information about avast 5 adnm and by the simple fact that ADNM is nothing more then a management interface deploying avast 4 clients with some extra code in them to report to the adnm instead of internet.
i know, its confusing when it says that any license
you could also have seen this on the webpages:
for less then 10 computers they recommend avast 5
for more then 10 they start with recommending the 4.8 standard suite
the line you saw is on the website
avast! Distributed Network Manager (ADNM) is free of charge. That means that any owner of avast! antivirus licenses (at least 2 licenses of avast! Professional or 1 Server Edition - except avast! for Linux) is eligible to use ADNM.
its a tricky one but they do say its for Professional (4.x), not for Pro (5.x)
I know Pro is shortend from Professional, but its a difference…
ok, enough talking like i work for Alwil
point that im trying to make: if your not 100% sure ask someone that knows more from the product (sales? local distributor?)
contact support, show them your problem and ask if they can send a license file for the ADNM, make sure you can show them your ordernumbers or anything that makes clear that you own the licenses for 5 and i dont think they will make any problem of sending a license file for the 4.8 version so you can use ADNM.
I asked Avast support in December about 5.0 and ADNM, and this was the answer:
"Hello,
avast 5.0 is under develop and there is no decision how, when or if will be avast 5.0 managed by ADNM!
Now we are working on non-managed version.
