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New Reward: Symantec Licenses for Personal Use

mister paul's picture
mister paul
October 26th, 2009
Filed under: , , , , ,
8 Agree, 0 Disagree
Status:
In Review

Here is a reward that Symantec could offer for basicly no cost, that I for one would really appreciate: Symantec licenses for my own computers at home.

Everyone contributing to Symantec Connect is a professional supporting Symantec products.  Pretty safe bet we all have computers at home - probably most of us have multilple ones.  I bet I'm not the only one running VMWare, VirtualBox, or another virtualization tool to build out virtual machines for different uses.  Any time I build a computer or VM at home, I have to decide what to do about AV. I would think that Symantec would love to give me Endpoint Protection rather than have me go out and download the free Avira or Microsoft Security Essentials. 

A lot of my personal VM's are Linux.  We aren't using Symantec on our Linux boxes at work, so I would think Symantec would be thrilled to have me doing it at home, so when the time comes here at work, I already know how to do it.

Since the cost to Symantec would be virtually zero, I recommend a low value - maybe 50 points?  That is high enough to ensure the person has participated at least somewhat, but below 100 point minimum for all the other rewards.

LeslieMiller's picture
LeslieMiller
4 weeks 8 hours ago

I really like this

We're currently working on a way to do this. Sounds easy, but not quite as easy as one would hope. We'll let you know when we have a solution.

0 votes
mister paul's picture
mister paul
4 weeks 7 hours ago

The devil is in the details

Thanks for your support of the idea!  As always, the devil will be in the details.  I hope Symantec will be flexible in the arrangement.  For instance, it would be great if the license could be used for personal use or a small business.  Here are a bunch of scenarios.  Which would be legitimate uses?

  1. Joe supports Symantec tools at an enterprise with 3000 licenses.  His family has 3 computers at home.  He uses his points to buy 3 copies of Symantec.
  2. Joe has been helping his church w/ their computers.  He decides expand this into a moonlighting business, doing consulting for other businesses and non-profits.  He uses his personal computer now for both personal and business work.
  3. Joe's wife Mary is a real geek.  She installs VMware on her computer, and starts building out VM's to play with different operating systems and to keep the family banking on a different VM from her web surfing. Joe buys a few more copies of Symantec with his points to support his wife's VM habit. He starts to wonder if it would be worth the 500 points for the unlimited license.
  4. Joe's moonlighting does well enough that he buys a laptop just for it.  His activity on the Symantec Forums brings him up to 500 points, and he gets the unlimited license, and uses one on the business laptop.  Mary buys a 1TB hard drive for all those VM snapshots.
  5. Joe's brother Larry loses his job and moves into the extra bedroom.  Joe installs Symantec on Larry's computer.
  6. Joe's business takes off.  He quits his day job, and works full time.  He continues to use his personal copy of Symantec for the business, and sells or recommends Symantec to his clients.  20 of his clients switch to Symantec in the first year he's on his own.
  7. Joe's church buys a new computer.  Joe installs Symantec on it, using his unlimited license.
  8. Joe hires someone.  He installs Symantec on the new hire's computer.

I built these scenarios to blur the distinction between personal and small business use.  I hope that Symantec would be flexible enough to allow Scenarios 1, 2, 3, and 4.  5 seems questionable.  6 could go either way, depending on Symantec's goals. 7 is clearly wrong.  8 is probably wrong, unless Symantec chooses to explicitly allow it to encourage companies who support Symantec products.

Good luck working through the specifics!  And thanks for considering it.

- Paul

0 votes
Cycletech's picture
Cycletech
4 weeks 7 hours ago

I would like to see SEP 12

I would like to see SEP 12 SBE available, and making some of the consumer products available as rewards would be great as well. Adding NIS, Norton 360 and Online Backup would be useful to many of our forum contributors.

Best,
Thomas

+1 (1 vote)