Symantec's Norton HelpDesk Assistant Reduces Support Costs

Powerful New Tool Enables Help Desks and Support Staff to Remotely Access, Diagnose and Fix PC Problems

CUPERTINO, Calif. - February 22, 1999 - Symantec Corporation (Nasdaq: SYMC), the world leader in utility software for business and personal computing, today announced Norton HelpDesk Assistant v1.0, a powerful tool for providing quick and reliable help desk support while reducing support costs and maximizing employee productivity. Norton HelpDesk Assistant allows support staffs to not only take over remote desktops, but to quickly diagnose and fix PC problems. In addition, Norton HelpDesk Assistant complements existing help desk solutions, enabling support personnel to quickly resolve end-user problems once a trouble ticket is created. Norton HelpDesk Assistant integrates best-of-breed products such as pcANYWHERE32, Norton Utilities, Norton CrashGuard, and Norton System Center, and includes Norton Ghost, on a single CD, making it the most effective way to reduce support costs while improving help desk performance.

Reducing Support Costs with Remote Access
"Total cost of ownership is a real issue today, and the largest component of this cost is represented by the expense of providing on-going support to PC users, including the growing community of laptop and mobile PC users," said Christopher Calisi, vice president of Symantec's Remote Productivity Solutions Business Unit. "Norton HelpDesk Assistant addresses the needs of end-users and support staff alike by eliminating blind troubleshooting and enabling help desk personnel to offer hands-on assistance anytime, anywhere."

Norton HelpDesk Assistant reduces the length of a help desk call by remotely solving PC problems through integration of remote-control capabilities from Symantec's pcANYWHERE, the market-leading remote productivity product. Gartner Group estimated in its report, "Lowering Help Desk Costs with Remote Control Tools," that during a three year period remote-control tools can lower annual help desk costs by 6 to 13 percent. Using pcANYWHERE, administrators receive remote control capabilities of end users' PCs without the additional infrastructure requirements and costs associated with traditional help desk solutions.

With pcANYWHERE Host on the client PC and the remote functionality on the administrator's system, support staff can easily and securely take control of an end-user PC across the LAN or WAN, or even by phone. Norton HelpDesk Assistant complements traditional support products by quickly diagnosing and fixing end-user problems on open trouble tickets. In addition, Norton HelpDesk Assistant's remote-control features enable help desk personnel to provide mobile users with hands-on technical support while those users are on the road.

Norton HelpDesk Assistant also helps reduce support costs by providing central management capabilities allowing administrators to automatically distribute, manage, and update Norton HelpDesk Assistant, as well as pcANYWHERE, Norton Utilities, and Norton CrashGuard, to networked and mobile users from a centralized location using Symantec's Norton System Center. This eliminates the need for support personal to make time-consuming visits to end-user PCs to manually install or update end-users systems. Norton System Center provides a single administrative solution for cost-effectively distributing, reporting, and alerting across a range of Symantec products, providing fast, reliable technical support to end users everywhere.

Quickly Diagnosing and Fixing PC Problems
Norton HelpDesk Assistant also includes the powerful troubleshooting features of Norton Utilities, the industry's most focused, intelligent problem-solving tool. These utilities provide users a clear and refined toolset that excels at addressing relevant computing problems and offering intelligible recommendations. Administrators can select from several Norton Utilities configurations including Basic for novice users, to Typical for intermediate users, to Complete for expert users.

"By utilizing the award winning technology found in Norton Utilities, remote users are able to detect and solve more computer problems than ever before," said Enrique Salem, vice president of Symantec's Security and Assistance Business Unit. "Not only are problems identified, but the product goes a critical step further and offers clear, prioritized recommendations for the best way to solve those problems."

With Norton Utilities integrated into Norton HelpDesk Assistant, users receive crash protection, disaster recovery utilities as well as prioritized recommendations for the best way to solve computer problems. As a result, without involving the corporate help desk staff, Norton HelpDesk Assistant helps maintain users' computer systems at peak performance levels, thereby minimizing end-user downtime and freeing the help desk to address more pressing support issues.

Norton HelpDesk Assistant also includes the industry standard disk imaging and disaster recovery technology of Norton Ghost, significantly reducing the time and expense associated with recovering a crashed PC, returning the PC to its original configuration in minutes. By including this state-of-the-art disk cloning technology, Norton HelpDesk Assistant enables users to recover whole hard drives and partitions as well as individual directories and files from an image file. Disaster recovery, then, is not only fast and reliable, but it's also complete.

Pricing and Availability
The manufacturer's suggested price for Norton HelpDesk Assistant is US$115.00/node for 100 nodes. The product will be available from Symantec and its reseller partners beginning March 10, 1999.

About Symantec
Symantec is the world leader in utility software for business and personal computing. Symantec products and solutions help make users productive and keep their computers safe and reliable anywhere and anytime. Symantec offers a broad range of solutions and is acclaimed as a leader in both customer satisfaction and product brand recognition. Symantec is traded on Nasdaq under the symbol SYMC. More information on the company and its products can be obtained at www.symantec.com.

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Brands and products referenced herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. All prices noted are in US dollars and are valid only in the United States.