Trend Taiwan – Day 3

Ok – so today is the day I spend with the Research and Development team. I arrived at the office to find that the lead for the team has pulled an all nighter and only left at 7am – I guess this is the real world now huh 🙂 So Jonas is my lead today. He’s just given me the latest build of Worry Free Business Security 5.0 (aka CSM 5.0) to install. This product is within days of going into a public beta and yesterday I saw some of the screens and functionality for the first time and was very impressed.

One of the cool features in v5.0 is location awareness. This feature allows you to modify the behaviour of other features of the product based on the location of the client computer. You might want lower security settings for your office and higher settings for when your out of the office. On example of this is the inbuilt firewall. Below you can see a screen shot of the product that allow me to set the firewall to be enabled when out of the office but disabled when inside the office. Very cool.

Another cool feature is Web Reputation Services. This allows the CSA (client server agent) to check the reputation of a web site when you surf to it and it will block the site if it’s a known dangerous site. Again location awareness can be set to allow you to modify the behaviour of the CSA for in and out of office scenarios.

The Behaviour Monitoring is a new feature in this version that is designed to combat threats that have not yet been identified using pattern file based scanning. It does this by monitoring the system and blocking or notifying the user that something wants to access their system. You can see below a few of the parameters that it monitors.

Oh goodie – I just broke the beta 🙂 Whilst playing with the product on a test machine, I was able to generate an unexpected error message. I guess that’s why I was testing it in the first place right! It’s interesting to see the passion in the R&D team here. I can’t understand their Chinese discussions, but I get the impression that they are very passionate about this product and they are taking it personally that I broke it. 🙂

Later in the afternoon the team took me through these new features in depth. I’ve got to say there is nothing better than being trained by the people who wrote the code. They know EVERYTHING about it. I think that the Behaviour Monitoring features alone will be worth the upgrade as it will protect our customers from threats that have not bee discovered as yet.

Today has been great – I’ve had the chance to work with the guys actually writing the code – they even offered to let me help, but this is one area that I have NO IDEA so it’s better to leave it to the professionals. Tomorrow I am spending the day with the QA team – which should be loads of fun too. Thanks Jonas for having me in your team today.