Avast 5 is here. But wait, what about ADNM and the other stuff?
Two weeks ago, we released the new avast 5. Although there were some minor hiccups in the beginning, I'd say it was a fairly successful launch, and the number of avast 5 users is now quickly growing - even though we haven't really started the official upgrade campaign yet.
As most of you already know, we released 3 new products: avast 5 Free AV, avast 5 Pro AV, and avast 5 Internet Security. However, there seems to be some confusion about what will happen with the other editions of avast. This article would like to explain the situation in a bit more detail.The three products we have released are all meant for consumer/SOHO market. In v4.8, we also have a bunch of other products. Let me explain what will happen to those, one by one.
avast! Server Edition (including the plug-ins) - this product will be released in v5 (or 5.1) in Summer 2010. It will be based on the new engine, and will also feature (among other things) a server-side antispam.
ADNM - this is a bit trickier. As our primary focus (as a company) is consumer and SME, we decided that for v5, we will build a brand-new management system specifically designed for small/medium business. It will be much easier to use and will have some other great improvements. There will be a separate blog post on it shortly. It is scheduled to ship sometime this summer. For large accounts, this will not be a good solutions though. We're still looking into ways on how to make the current ADNM work with avast v5.
avast! WHS Edition - the v5 clients will be updated to talk to the WHS Edition shortly. On the flip side, the WHS Edition itself is expected to be also ported to the v5 engine eventually.
avast! Professional Family Pack wasn't really a product but just a bundle of 10x Professional Edition + WHS Edition. The Pack is going to be discontinued, but obviously, you can still build the same functionality with the other products.
avast! Mac Edition - this will get the v5 engine sometime during this year (no specific dates yet, sorry). Although the malware situation on the Mac platform is still quite calm, we are a bit worried about Apple's (and Adobe's) general attitude toward security and expect the situation to become worse.
avast! Linux Edition - similar to Mac. Even though it also have considerably lower priority than Windows, Linux is an important platform and we don't want to ignore it. BTW did you know that avast just got another VB100 award -- and this time, the test was done on Linux?
avast! PDA Edition - this is a very old product which currently lacks support for major mobile platforms (Symbian, iPhone, Android, ...). Its future in uncertain.
Net.purum - the product will be discontinued.
Beside these, we're planning a few new products for 2010 but it's probably too early to talk about these for now. Stay tuned!