Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition

Hello everyone,

I work for an MSP and we are wanting to renew some of our clients onto cloud based management for their symantec but I am encountering issues in rolling it out.

I have created the SymGroupPolicyDeployment.msi from the portal for endpoint cloud deployment. On a standard Windows 7 x64 workstation, with no SEP SBS 12.1 installed the cloud product deploys fine and the agent gets added to the machine and added into the portal.

On my second test machine however I have SEP 12.1 SBS Edition installed (as most of my current clients do). I was expecting the deployment of the Cloud SEP to remove the SEP 12.1 SBS Edition but that does not appear to be the case. The documentation is not clear on this.

Is this expected behaviour with this setup? Does the SymGroupPolicyDeployment.msi for the endpoint cloud not remove SEP 12.1 SBS edition? If not do we know when this is coming?

Thanks in advance for any assistance

GavinS,

I'm currently looking into this for you but my understanding is that .Cloud Endpoint Protection and the Small Business Product are separate and will require the old one to be removed prior to installation of the new client (I may be wrong and do want to confirm). I'm hoping to find a simple and efficient way for you to do this but I'm not finding any documentation immediately to help with that. It does appear that an 11.x product would need to be uninstalled manually which is described here (with an option to automate it):

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO60777

I'll see if that will be the same case for the 12.x product. If you feel there's any aspect of your question I did not quite understand please don't hesitate to let me know. I am curious - I was unable to find any documentation regarding SymGroupPolicyDeployment.msi. Do you have a link to anything that describes creating this MSI? It would be nice if there were an option to do some sort of competitive uninstall.

Thanks!

Daniel Hartnell

***Edit: If anyone from the .Cloud team can correct me on anything that is incorrect it would be appreciated.

I found the SymGroupPolicyDeployment.msi information in the .Cloud administrative guide so you can ignore my previous question about that.

Within the administrative guide it does say "To get the best performance from Symantec Endpoint Protection, you must remove
any Symantec or other antivirus or firewall product before installing your agents." and then continues to list products that can be removed automatically but it does not list SEP 12.x which seems peculiar to me. It seems that either the removal will need to be done manually or it should somehow upgrade but is failing in your particular case. I would like to determine which is the case.

*** Updated links:

This document does seem to suggest that any previous SEP product will need to be uninstalled but it does only list SEP 11.x. Typically any potentially conflicting applications should be removed automatically with your new deployment but that does not appear to be happening in your particular case.

http://consolehelp.symanteccloud.com/Home.aspx/Default (From this landing page I clicked on: See Deploying Symantec.cloud using Active Directory).

 For anyone else that may need it here is a link to the administrative guide:

http://consolehelp.symanteccloud.com/symhelpContent/EN_US/SCLD/docs/AdministratorGuide.pdf

*** Another update:

If you are looking for options to help with uninstalling the client these documents may prove helpful:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH184988

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO55432

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH102470

As a troubleshooting step it may be worth removing the old SEP install on one machine and attempting the deployment once more via Active Directory to see if that will work.

Hi Daniel

I'd just like to thank you for your detailed response, you've confirmed what I already thought that the automated uninstall may work on SEP 11 but not on SEP 12 which is a little bit confusing.

I've tried every kind of deployment on my test machine and none of them can remove SEP 12 automatically - if I run the installer manually it prompts that SEP is installed and to uninstall it first with no option to remove it.

The GPO removal is not an option as we don't deploy via GPO. I considered the MSIEXEC /x option but the difficulty is we have many different clients of ours on different versions and I need a way to standardise it across companies (thus the built in removal functionality would have been perfect).

It may just boil down to I can't roll this product out, I feel like it is not ready yet. Short of the excellent support from people like yourself the support for this product seems completely dead. The support e-mail we sent over two days ago now has still not been answered and the abilithy to create a ticket in the portal is broken. I feel like I would be doing my clients a disservice rolling this out in said state, which is a shame because its functionality is quite good. It just means Symantec will miss out on the thousands of potential clients we have ready to go on this.

Once again though Daniel, thanks for your time. It's refreshing to see someone so helpful.

You can use SEPprep utility for remove sep client.

SEPprep: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH148513

You may want to try SEPprep utility. Its a competitive product uninstall tool. But it can also be configured to uninstall SEP Client by modifying the following line in the SEPprep.ini file.

RemoveSymantec=Y

You can push this to the clients through GPO (like a logon script) or using a deployment tool.

 Check this artical if help you

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/uninstall-sep-client-through-gpo

Remotaly uninstall

http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/uninstall-sep-client-remotely