Woeful Avast Business reliability since Christmas.

system · 2017-01-22T22:50:55.000Z

We have Avast Business, in a school with approx 250 devices for staff.
Mix of Asus PC desktops, Lenovo and Microsoft Surface laptops and Macbook Air/Pro’s.
PC’s are primarily windows 10, few win8 devices still around. Mac’s are OSX 10.11 or 10.12.
Desktops are domain bound, laptops 1:1.

Ever since the Christmas break we (IT) have been fighting issues with Avast Business:

I have had to deal with close to 50 PC laptops/desktops now where Avast has killed/blocked the network. In the case of the desktops it stops both the wired and wifi connection. Have to manually do a repair, reboot, then check that the avast services actually start properly. In the case of laptops the wifi just goes to “not connected” or picks up a 192.168 self assigned address. Also seen it blocking the WiFi on some of the MacBook fleet.
On Random PC machines I’ll find the Avast icon lurking in the system tray with a red X on it. “Avast background service not running”. Sometimes opening avast and starting it works. Other times I have to do a repair then reboot.
When we first started using Avast the version initially installed was 11.2. All the PC’s that got this version cannot/will not upgrade properly. The ‘Programs and Features’ list says its version 11.2 installed, but when I do an uninstall it errors out “Cannot find C:\Programs”, yet avast is still running. Opening avast says its version 12.3. Rebooting seems to repopulate the Programs and Features list with the correct version (12.3), however I still have to do a repair for it to start working correctly and stop blocking the network.
Some devices - more commonly on Mac’s - Avast will forget/lose our Business subscription and go unregistered. Full remove, reboot, reinstall required.
Avast Outlook 2016 plugin on some PC’s causes Outlook to take 30sec+ to load on some PC’s.

Current Opinion of Avast Business. VERY POOR.
Anyone else experiencing such issues?

Eddy · 2017-01-23T07:42:27.000Z

Contact avast > https://support.business.avast.com/hc/en-us

Mac · 2017-01-29T10:30:37.000Z

Of these listed, the only one I can attest to is the Outlook plugin. It does indeed sometimes take 30+ seconds to load outlook with it installed. Since most of our clients have a server or gateway level email scanner, we disable the mail shield so this isn’t a issue.

Announcements