Chapter 1 - Introduction

  • Article

 

Applies to: Microsoft Antigen

The Microsoft Antigen Enterprise Manager (AEM) is a management tool that provides IT administrators with a way to centrally manage Antigen software solutions on all Enterprise servers. Using a browser-based user interface, the AEM provides centralized deployment and reporting.

Centralized deployment allows administrators to deploy various files and settings to all or selected servers in the enterprise. Using the AEM, you can deploy the following to remote machines:

  • Antigen and Antigen upgrades.
  • Templates for configuration management.
  • Antigen license files.
  • Scan engine signature file updates in order to centralize the update procedure.
  • General Options to configure system-level settings.
  • In addition, you can retrieve the following from remote machines:
  • Program Log, Incidents Database, and Quarantine Database.
  • Quarantined data.

Centralized reporting allows administrators to more closely monitor the servers in the enterprise and evaluate the effectiveness of antivirus software. The AEM collects statistics from all its managed servers and stores them in a central repository for later analysis. The statistics are also used by the AEM to alert administrators to potential problems by monitoring event thresholds and looking for statistical anomalies that may indicate a problem. Reports provide information about the trends in virus, spam, filter, and update activity for each server or the entire enterprise.

Data used by the AEM can be stored in MSDE (a scaled down version of SQL Server) or an existing SQL server—locally or remotely—using SQL or Windows authentication.

Note

The AEM uses bi-directional DCOM to communicate information between AEM and the Agents located on remote machines. In environments where internal firewalls are present, the firewall configuration must be configured to allow the DCOM protocol.