Symantec IM Manager

Symantec IM Manager Overview

Symantec IM Manager seamlessly manages, secures, logs, and archives corporate instant-messaging traffic with certified support for public and enterprise IM networks—including granular policy enforcement and security controls for files, audio, video, VoIP, application sharing, and other real-time communication capabilities. IM Manager mitigates the potential risks associated with the use of IM in the enterprise.

Symantec IM Manager seamlessly manages, secures, logs, and archives corporate IM traffic with certified support for consumer IM services and enterprise IM platforms and with granular policy controls for text messaging, file transfers, audio, video, VoIP, application sharing, and other real-time communication capabilities associated with IM. Symantec IM Manager secures corporate networks against external threats such as IM viruses, worms, and malware through the use of real-time content filtering, worm and virus signature detection, behavior-based threat protection, and file-based antivirus scanning. It also protects organizations against the loss of sensitive information or intellectual property over IM through granular policy controls for internal IM usage, including internal message routing, regular expression pattern matching, and real-time user monitoring.

Integrated with Symantec Security Response, Symantec IM Manager offers the industry’s first zero-day threat protection from IM-borne viruses and worms.¹ Utilizing a patent-pending behavior- and signature-based system, Symantec IM Manager provides automatic protection for new and emerging IM viruses. In addition, it provides a tool to enforce content and regulatory compliance policies for all aspects of IM, including the ability to selectively log messages based on user, group, or domain attributes; selectively insert customer message disclaimers; and capture 100 percent of message traffic for internal or external third-party archiving.²

1. See the Symantec Real-Time Threat Protection System (RTTPS) press release, July 2005.
2. Message queue technology is a transacted system that helps ensure high performance and message integrity by acting as a persistent, networkable buffer between the point of capture and the archive. If a message is not accepted by the queue, it is not sent.

Feature and Benefits:

Key Features:

• Zero-day virus protection with patent-pending technology for detection and protection against zero-day attacks with integrated virus scanning.
• Powerful and flexible policy management for managing single users or large enterprise groups with pre-defined, configurable rules within a configurable hierarchy.
• Real-time content control blocks messages and/or notifies administrators when messages containing restricted phrases are sent.
• Out-of-the-box integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault, Symantec's industry-leading archiving and compliance solution.

Key Benefits:

• Decreases management costs by relieving the administrative burden of instant messaging through centralized management and control of multiple IM networks and servers.
• Avoids costly damage by protecting the organization against external and internal threats with robust virus and content filtering.
• Reduces legal and corporate risk through better oversight and control in relation to corporate and regulatory policy.

New Features:

Manage instant messaging to drive business results

• User management and access control—Manage and control IM user, group, and domain access to disparate IM systems, including integration with enterprise directory structures.
• Priority-based policy enforcement—Establish consistent IM usage policy enforcement, including real-time content filtering, granular file transfer, and advanced client feature controls.
• Real-time analytics and reporting—Obtain visibility into IM usage and growth patterns with real-time altering, trend reporting, and custom monitoring.

Protect the organization with security and usage control

• Zero-day protection—Take advantage of patent-pending technology for detection and protection against zero-day attacks.
• Automatic threat updates—Automatically update virus and spam signatures from the industry-leading Symantec Security Response Team.
• Virus scanning and file transfer control—Scan file transfers leveraging the Symantec AntiVirus™ Scan Engine to prevent infected or confidential files from traversing your network.

Comply with legal and corporate accountability standards

• Rich message archive—Selectively capture and retain IM conversations with direct links to employee data from the corporate directory for enhanced retention and discovery.
• Real-time content filtering—Block messages and/or notify administrators when messages containing restricted phrases or inappropriate content are sent.
• Integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault™—Deliver IM conversations to Symantec Enterprise Vault via out-of-the-box, transactional integration with Enterprise Vault. This allows organizations to review IM and email conversations in one centralized store.

System Requirements:

Mininum recommended hardware requirements

• 1.8 GHz Pentium III dual-processor
• 512 RAM
• 30+ GB Hard Disk
• 1 GB Virtual Memory

Recommend IM manager server

• 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® processor
• 1 GB RAM
• 60 GB hard disk

Recommended database server

• 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processor
• 1 GB RAM
• 100 GB hard disk

Mininum recommended software requirements

• Windows Server 2003, 2000 Server Service Pack 4 or later
• Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0 for the pass through relay (for DMZ deployment)
• MDAC 2.5 or later
• Internet Explorer 6.0 or later
• MSXML Core Services 4.0 SP2
• Microsoft IIS Web Services
• Access to Oracle (Oracle 9i v 9.2.0.5 with ODBC drivers 9.2.0.63, Oracle Enterprise Client 9.2.01)
• MS-SQL 2005, 2000 SP4 or MSDE installed database

Sample of supported IM networks

• AIM 6.5
• Yahoo 8.1
• Windows LiveMessenger 8.5
• Google Talk
• ICQ 6.0
• Sametime 8.0
• Office Communications Server 2007

For a full list, visit: http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-gate.nsf/doci d/2007082917260454

Documentation:

Download the Symantec IM Manager Datasheet (PDF).