A Shitty Poem for a Shitty Company:
Damn you to hell Symantec. 
I used to love you, but now I’m jilted. 
Your SAV had me going for years,
Reliable, a workhorse you were.
Now you are a beheamoth,
and your products suck ass.
Endpoint Security is a joke,
and so is your virus protection.
If I continue to be yours,
I will have a full head of gray.

About a year ago I migrated our firm to Symantec Endpoint Security (the first release, RTM) from SAV 10.  It has been nothing but a complete fiasco.  I’m pretty good at this stuff and had deployed many, many SAV systems previously.  When I initially installed SEP (initial release) I had high hopes.  These hopes were immediately dashed with countless problems that took weeks to get fully straightened out.  Although I “know” the product much better now and have less problems with it, I still hate it with a passion for the following reasons:

• beta-level software billed as “production” - buggy as hell
• bloated administration interface (good concept, terrible execution)
• anti-virus that DOESN’T WORK half the time (ask me about infections that WHIZZED right by SEP - like the CNN spam sourced Windows XP Antivirus virus/malware)
• constant maintenance releases/bug fixes.  99% of the time these upgrades cause major issues.. and there’s one every couple of months.  RTM-MR1-MR2-MR3–blah
• 50-80 minutes on hold to get to tech support
• recurring issues with LiveUpdate, random definition distrubition
• huge footprint, slows endpoints down considerably compared to SAV
• firewall is completely problematic - I don’t even use it
• 15 GB server disk footprint.  I have 50 workstations and a 10 GB SEP embedded management database - that’s 200 mb per workstation!  WTF?! 
• i could go on…

With that said, all our SEP products (including Symantec Mail Security which I have less of a problem with) will be expiring in March of 2009.  I’m probably moving to AVG.  Can’t say I’d recommend any of Symantec’s products, maybe with the exception of Backup Exec.