New Norton 2000 Package Addresses Y2K Needs of Small Businesses

Product Makes It Easier for Small Businesses to be Prepared for Year 2000

Cupertino, Calif,. - March 15, 1999 - Symantec Corporation (Nasdaq: SYMC), the world leader in utility software for business and personal computing, today announced Norton 2000 is available for small businesses with fewer than 99 seats. Norton 2000 is an effective Year 2000 solution that helps prepare valuable desktop and laptop PCs. By addressing software Y2K issues, Norton 2000 makes it easier for small businesses to effectively reduce the threat of downtime resulting from non-compliant components and applications.

"Small businesses represent a significant part of the US economy," said Enrique Salem, vice president of Symantec's Security and Assistance Business Unit. "To that end, Symantec is pleased to be able to provide these businesses with the most comprehensive Y2K tool in a more convenient, cost-effective package."

Norton 2000 continues to earn praise from publications representing both the public and private sectors. In January, Government Computer News awarded Norton 2000 its Reviewer's Choice designation for outperforming its six competitors, and Windows Magazine named Norton 2000 to its influential WinList-the only Y2K solution to receive the recognition.

According to the first quarterly report by the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, progress toward Y2K resolution among the nation's 24 million small and medium-sized businesses is an issue that must be addressed. "Most of these businesses do not have a vast number of information technology systems, but, like large companies, they too need to assess how the Year 2000 problem could impact their operations," the report states. The Small Business Administration (SBA) has also mounted an aggressive outreach program to increase awareness and promote action on the problem among small and medium-sized businesses.

Norton 2000 effectively addresses these concerns by offering small businesses a powerful tool that allows them to proactively prepare their systems for the new millennium. Norton 2000 quickly and identifies issues with the three critical desktop and laptop vulnerabilities common to small businesses: hardware problems such as BIOS and real-time clock, commercial off-the-shelf applications, and end-user created data.

How Norton 2000 Works
One of the most critical issues small businesses face with the approach of the next millennium is how to monitor spreadsheets and databases that are continually changing. One serious issue involves dates that fall close to a "cusp" point. Excel version 4, 5 and 7 assume that year values from 00 to 19 represent 2000-2019 and year values from 20-99 represent 1920-1999. Excel 8 extends this cusp point to 29/30. As a result, dates in a spreadsheet with years close to these cusp points may be incorrectly interpreted. In addition, the cusp point will change across a simple software upgrade and cause erroneous processing of dates. All of these types of errors can have widespread implications for both small businesses and off-site employees of larger corporations.

To address those issues, Norton 2000 includes a data scanning component that not only discovers Y2K problems in these complex files, but also generates a customizable report detailing findings. Norton 2000 scans the following files: Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Access, dBase, Clipper, FoxPro, and Paradox. For recent versions of Excel spreadsheets, Norton 2000 color-codes and annotates the spreadsheet to highlight and explain Y2K issues in each affected cell.

Norton 2000 also audits other popular software applications for year 2000 compliance and tests those applications against a database of known year 2000 problems. The application database is kept up-to-date using LiveUpdate.

In addition, Norton 2000 uses a boot floppy to test system clocks and the BIOS, thereby preventing users from inadvertently destroying data and program configurations during testing. For added convenience, Norton 2000 also offers a Windows-based System Date Test.

Pricing and Availability
Small businesses can purchase Norton 2000 in quantities of 10-99 seats for approximately $37 per seat.

System Requirements
For Windows 95/NT, Norton 2000 1.0 requires an Intel 80486 or higher, 10MB hard drive space, and 16MB RAM.

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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