You’ve no doubt heard whispers on the grapevine, and it’s finally here. As part of our continued efforts to bring you the best possible solutions for your business, we are excited to announce that the MAX RM Managed Antivirus (MAV) engine is now powered by Bitdefender.

With the threat landscape continuing to evolve and with new variants emerging almost daily, we want to ensure we are providing the best protection possible to you and your customers. Incorporating the Bitdefender antivirus engine into MAV helps us meet this challenge.

We have tried to keep the look and feel of the new MAV offering as similar as possible to the existing solution, but there are a number of key benefits being introduced that we’d like to make you aware of:

• Better Malware Protection
Third-party testing proves our new solution to be more effective against fighting malware and viruses, while introducing less false positives – providing you better overall protection and security. The addition of Behavioural Scanning, along with Active Protection, will provide yet another layer of defense.
• Personalised Branding
MSPs can now brand the MAV solution with their own product name, company, email address, telephone number and website – directing your customers straight to you for support.
• System Variables within Exclusions
One of the most requested features we have had for MAV is the ability to use system variables within policy exclusions – we are very happy to now be able to deliver this to you! This greatly simplifies matters by ensuring one exclusion can apply across multiple operating systems.
• “Snooze” Feature for Easier Maintenance
Our new “Snooze” feature allows you to temporarily disable MAV, for up to one hour, giving you the ability to more easily perform maintenance on a given machine. This means there is no longer a need to move the device into a new policy while performing maintenance.
• Site Concentrator Applied Across All Devices
The previous restrictions for laptops to use the Site Concentrator has been removed. All MAV devices can now download definitions and updates via the Site Concentrator.
• Direct Communication to the Endpoint
MAV endpoints will now receive instant commands sent from the dashboard. This means you no longer have to wait for the endpoint to check in to the server to receive scanning and update commands.

All the details…
Here’s what you need to know about installing the new MAV offering…

NOTE: The new Managed Antivirus offering, featuring Bitdefender, can be found in RC Agent v9.10.0.

1.    Before deploying the RC agent for the new MAV offering, review the 3 new Bitdefender policies in the RM Dashboard. These can be found under Settings > Managed Antivirus > Protection Policies.

NOTE:  Recommended exclusions from Bitdefender and Microsoft have been applied to the policies, there is no longer a need to have different policies for different Server OS types unless you would like to set custom exclusions or settings that should not apply to other OS types.

2.    Deploy RC agent v9.10.0 to a Windows machine. This can be done from the Agent menu or via Edit Workstation (or Server) in the Agent version section of the General Settings tab.

3.  After the RC agent v9.10.0 has been installed, you can now enable Managed Antivirus with the Bitdefender engine selected. This can be done from the Settings > Managed Antivirus > Settings menu (3) or on an individual device with Edit Workstation. Select Bitdefender for the Engine and then the desired Bitdefender policy to apply (4).

The MAV Service will now begin installation. The North Pane tab will show a green dot after the MAV installation has completed (5). The Summary tab in the RM South Pane will show the status of the Managed Antivirus installation. After the new MAV service has been deployed, it will apply the desired policy and update the definition files.

NOTE:  Migrating from VIPRE to Bitdefender requires a reboot. Once the reboot has been completed and VIPRE is uninstalled, the summary tab will show Bitdefender as pending until it completes installation. (6)

And finally…
The staging release notes are listed below.

Staging Release Notes
Please note that staging release notes are subject to change. Final release notes will go out with the release.

Summary for Service Release
– Service release focused on new features, bug fixes and performance
– Dashboard v6.1
– Agent v9.8.13 GA, Agent v9.10.0 RC

Dashboard v6.1
FEATURE: New Managed Antivirus offering – powered by Bitdefender.

Agent v9.10.0 RC
FEATURE: Introducing Bitdefender engine deployment for MAV.
BUGFIX: Address Site Concentrator intermittently failing while downloading VIPRE definition files on some machines.
BUGFIX: Correct issues where Non-English text in Active Discovery exceeded allotted space in some areas of the UI.
BUGFIX:  Remediate Active Discovery DCOM errors being written to the event log.
BUGFIX:  Lessen Active Discovery failed login attempts on SMB guest accounts.
BUGFIX:  Address Offline Network alerts from Active Discovery.
BUGFIX:  Ensure Symantec Backup Exec 2012 Backup check no longer duplicates log entries.
BUGFIX:  Corrected the wrong status returned for failed checks in AV history and Backup history

Agent v9.8.13 GA
Unchanged from 7/1 release. Includes all the updates since the current production Agent v9.8.9.