Symantec Ghost 8.0 Provides Customers Comprehensive PC Management Solution

Symantec Ghost 8.0 Provides Customers Comprehensive PC Management Solution

PC management solution reduces IT costs by accelerating windows migration and streamlining configuration management tasks

Hong Kong -- 22 October 2003 - Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC), the world leader in Internet security, today announced Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition, a PC management solution that now offers inventory and local cloning enhancements to save IT administrators valuable time. Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition assists in reducing IT costs by providing customers an effective solution for operating system deployment, software distribution and back-up and disaster recovery.

Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition introduces a new hardware and software inventory feature that allows customers to manage hardware and software inventories within their networks from a central location. IT administrators are able to ease OS migration tasks by creating "Dynamic Folders" to manage a group of target PCs based upon hardware or software attributes. Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition also now provides a client staging area that enables customers to reduce network bandwidth by keeping a local backup and recovery image, thereby eliminating the need to repeatedly push images over the network.

"Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition enables customers to reduce the cost and time in deploying and managing servers, desktops and laptops within the enterprise environment," said David Sykes, Senior Director, Asia Pacific, Symantec. "Symantec Ghost continues its market and technological leadership by offering proven capabilities that make it one of the most comprehensive PC management and software deployment solutions available for enterprise environments."

Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition is an easy-to-use, integrated solution that provides operating system deployment, configuration, computer migration and software deployment across hardware platforms and operating system types. The solution offers IT administrators the ability to deploy or restore an OS image or application onto a PC in minutes and easily migrate individual user settings and profiles to customise the PC.

Symantec Ghost 8.0 includes several new features designed to enhance PC deployment and configuration management functionality in enterprise environments:

Hardware/Software Inventory - Customers can manage hardware and software inventory from a centralised console and create detailed reports from customisable views. Enables IT administrators to design provisioning tasks based on specific client attributes.
Client Staging Area - A designated repository that can be dynamically created on managed PCs which provides the ability to launch and execute contents locally, store whole disk images, software "hot fixes" and user profiles. Contents may be preserved during a cloning or restore procedure to ensure an "onboard" recovery solution for every PC.
Multicast File Transfer - Allows an IT administrator to send and execute individual files or critical security-related "hot fixes" to multiple recipients simultaneously.
Microsoft Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) Support - Includes a 32-bit version of Ghost and GhostCast Server designed and certified for the Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) as well as for Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
External Media Support - Provides support for direct cloning to supported USB, Firewire and recordable DVD external drives and devices.
Enhanced File System Support - Includes the ability to read and write images to and from NTFS partitions. Ghost 8.0 also provides full LILO and GRUB support for the EXT2 and EXT3 Linux file systems.

Availability
Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition will be available in Asia Pacific late November 2003 through Symantec's network of distributors and resellers. For additional product information, please call 23286206 or visit www.symantec.com.hk. To obtain licensing information or to locate a reseller, visit http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/license on the World Wide Web.

About Symantec
Symantec, the world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security software and appliance solutions to individuals, enterprises and service providers. The company is a leading provider of client, gateway and server security solutions for virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises and service providers around the world. Symantec's Norton brand of consumer security products is a leader in worldwide retail sales and industry awards. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Symantec has worldwide operations in 36 countries. For more information, please visit www.symantec.com.

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FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENT: This press release contains forward-looking statements, including forecasts of future revenue and earnings per share, expected activities, and other financial and business results that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to differ materially from results expressed or implied by this press release. Such risk factors include, among others: the sustainability of recent growth rates, particularly in consumer products; the anticipation of the growth of certain market segments, particularly enterprise security; the positioning of Symantec's products in those segments; the competitive environment in the software industry; general market conditions, fluctuations in currency exchange rates, changes to operating systems and product strategy by vendors of operating systems; and whether Symantec can successfully develop new products and the degree to which these gain market acceptance. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements in this press release. Additional information concerning these and other risk factors is contained in the Risk Factors sections of Symantec's previously filed Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended March 28, 2003. Symantec assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release except as otherwise required by law.