Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Licensing Bugs Can Bite Symantec Corporate Customers, Too While Symantec’s corporate customers are spared the indignities of dealing with the product activation in the consumer edition of Norton AntiVirus 2004, it appears that other licensing pitfalls may await them. A reader writes: I wanted to let you know about an incredibly frustrating upgrade from version 8 to 8.1 for Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition. Symantec has added an undocumented licensing dance to the install which isn't described in the manual, the program's help file, or can be found by searching their knowledgebase. After installing an "unmanaged" installation -- where a mobile user is allowed to update virus signatures without being attached to the network -- a warning says that I must run the License Install Tool to enter my serial number. After calling Symantec's tech support, they gave me the document number for the secret license tool. After installing/uninstalling/license tooling a few times to no avail, I called Symantec again. Apparently, the serial number printed on the upgrade -- which I had received three days earlier -- was printed months ago and had expired. They issued another serial number which miraculously worked. It would have been great if any of this was documented somewhere visible to me so I could have saved 1½ hours. 2:23:51 PM    comment []