Search, tag, columns, WoL... why there's not real evolution?

flibuste

Hi,

I'm using F-Secure for 2 years, with a lot of problems with Windows 7 (updating this workstations have never worked, it's ok only since W10 migration) and I still don't understand why key features are not present in your product.

 

First of all, your search engine is more or less... useless. It's not able to retrieve a string! We have to type the beginning of the string. If I search for "88GK", it don't find WK-88GK.

 

Tags are useful... but there is only ONE tag per station. No way to add user field. So, no way to order by specific user information.

Speaking of ordering, ordering by OS version only partially work: it's not possible to have specific Windows 10 version grouped (10.0.17 137, 10.0.18362...)

 

Always on search/ordering, it's unfortunately impossible to make multiple selection with shift and ctrl. Totally unproductive.

 

Concerning columns, it will be great to have a customized view, with choosen columns.

 

And finally, the update system, in addition to not always being functional (impossible to upgrade Windows 10 versions; the "service pack" update does not work), is not at all practical because it does not allow WoL (or, better - we can dream -, a sleep/wake system) nor the staggered updates (for example : make critical updates immediately, make other updates in the evening, gradually, make version updates only at night).

 

Bonus: web protection make a lot of false positive and browsing is sometimes much slower (on recent PC, great CPU and 100M fiber connection...).

 

Yes, so you will have understood that I'm not totally satisfied with F-Secure FSB. And I wonder about renewing it for our 200 computers. But I don't think there's much missing to make it a good solution. Too bad it hasn't changed much in the last two years (except for paid options...).

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

 

JamesC

Hi flibuste

 

I will check with the relevant team, and update you accordingly.

MikaArasola

Hi!

Firstly, I would like to thank you for the extensive feedback. I'll try to give response to the main items you brought up.

I'll start with the lack of evolution / not changing much in the last two years. It's true that there have been too little visible changes, but in the background we have been doing a lot of work. The Computer Protection and Server Protection clients are not just a branding change with minor changes to the old code, rather it's a totally new product with new backend services and a basis that makes future work and feature development a lot easier and faster. Recent AV tests have confirmed that the result is a world class client, but the important part is how much easier it will now be to start implementing new functionality.

The search engine used by the portal does not support wild cards leading to the search term. We have been working with a new search technology which solves your problem, but in the first phase it will be used for searching profiles. We are almost ready to release this functionality and moving the device search to this new technology is the next step on that path.

We have initial designs around allowing an admin to select (and save) a preferred list of columns for the device view. It's possible that improving the ordering will be included as part of this, if not then it can be added on top. We also have new designs for the filters and will try to include the possibility to select multiple items.

The original tagging (or label) functionality was supposed to work as grouping, but the implementation was partial. We have lately worked on grouping type functionality around Active Directory structure and will complete that before continuing around this theme. The main goal should be that these would be usable outside the device list as well, but I understand the need for multiple tags. We have not yet decided on which direction we will go to once the Active Directory part is done. One option would be to reuse the "grouping" logic that we will be have with Active Directory, another would be to extend labels but this is still open.

We continuously work to reduce the number of false positives and we have some large projects in place that will improve things even further in the future. We are also working to make it easier for an administrator or end user to report false positives. In terms of Browsing Protection one of the areas we will be improving is how the related events show up in the portal. There are quite a lot of possible combinations of settings which can result in a page being blocked and most of them are not visible in the portal to protect the end users privacy (and comply with local privacy laws / GDPR). We believe we have found a good way to show these to an administrator so that they can see which settings are resulting in pages being blocked while at the same time respecting the end users privacy. This should make the feature a lot easier to use from an administrators point of view.

For Software Updater we have a lot of plans to improve it in the future. These will be done once we have finished the migration to the new clients as the old ones work differently making it inefficient to change the overall functionality. If you are consistently having issues installing updates I would recommend creating a support case so that we can investigate the root cause, but overall we do have a lot of plans in our mind covering most of what you mention (apart from waking up the machines which is an interesting idea that I'll discuss with developers). We are already doing some background work preparing for when the migration is finished.

I'm really sorry that you have not been totally satisfied with PSB, but I do believe that we will soon be in a position to address a lot of the items you are highlighting and many more as well. I really hope you will be here to see them, and if you are then please notice that you can also send feedback directly from the PSB portal.

flibuste

You are right to insist on the work done in the background because, yes, the quality of the antivirus has clearly improved.

I'm glad to see that the improvements I'm talking about are on the roadmap!

Thank you for this detailed answer which shows your involvement and - I hope:) - the seriousness of development.

etomcat

Dear Mika,

 

> We continuously work to reduce the number of false positives and we have some large projects in place that will improve things even further in the future. We are also working to make it easier for an administrator or end user to report false positives.

 

That can't come soon enough. Today I reported a DOZEN different false file malware alerts in the PSB system to F-Secure Virus Lab, but I think only about half of them will be resolved cause the lab keeps demanding binary file samples in those cases where a VirusTotal webportal reference URL isn't available for the exact hash checksum.

 

Collecting samples from an end-user computer is essentially impossible with PSB, where the client fleet is geographically distributed and I have never been any of those locations, e.g. ~5000 school computers throughout the country are visible under our SoP level account and they regularly throw various false alarms mostly regarding domestic hungarian created program codes.

 

I feel the amount of file false alarms grew sharply since the BitDefender main virus scan engine got phased out and replaced with Avira OEM in F-Secure protection and the situation still hasn't normalized.

 

Thanks for your kind attention, Sincerely: Tamas Fehr, Huungary.

maaretp

Hi Tamas,

 

happy to report from R&D that a feature that would make reporting false alarms easier is under development and while we make no promises on schedule, our general principle is that things that are started will finish. We have felt the same pain on our side, and appreciate you for reminding us that our set priorities are in the right direction.

 

       Maaret