Industry Watch

New Norton package for Windows 95 Symantec Corp. last week announced Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95 the company's latest version of its popular utilities package. The product which will begin shipping this week features new and advanced problem-solving disaster-recovery and optimization capabilities designed to tune and optimize the user systems for crash protection and provide continuous correction of hardware and software problems according to Symantec officials.

A new feature to this product is WinDoctor a stand-alone utility that is designed to monitor and clean the system and intelligently detect and fix problems within the Windows 95 registry system files and software applications. WinDoctor checks for problems such as lost shortcuts invalid registry entries and broken applications.

The new product also provides access to an Internet-based utility that provides patches for Norton Utilities anti-virus updates as well as any other software applications and hardware drivers on a user's system. In addition it is designed to provide crash protection and recovery services to ensure that users can save their work officials said

New to the Norton product line is the Rescue Disk a feature that allows users to save rescue information on an Iomega Corp. Zip disk. To recover a system that has crashed users can use the disk to boot directly into Windows instead of DOS according to officials.

Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95 will be available for $79 through Symantec resellers' General Services Administration contracts. Current users of Norton Utilities will receive a $30 rebate for an upgrade.

Legato launches federal unit

Legato Systems Inc. an enterprise storage software concern located in Palo Alto Calif. has formed a new government operations business unit located in Washington D.C. to direct its federal government sales efforts.

The new unit will be headed up by Wayne Leonard the company's new director of government operations. Before joining Legato Leonard was the group director of Oracle Corp.'s state and local government unit.

The company's flagship software product NetWorker supports many storage management server platforms and accommodates a large array of clients servers and storage devices. NetWorker is designed to offer fast online backup for relational database management systems and applications.

Apple offers new Power Macintosh line

Apple Computer Inc. last week announced a new line of Power Macintosh computers as well as a new model for building delivering its new products to market.

The new Power Macintosh G3 computers will feature either a 233 or 266 MHz PowerPC G3 processor with a 512K Level 2 memory cache. The new systems also come with a 66 MHz system and main memory bus and 32M of memory expandable to 384M. Other features include a 4 or 6G IDE hard drive a floppy disk drive and a maximum 24X CD-ROM drive - all internal.

Pricing for basic configurations range from $2 000 for desktop models to $3 000 for minitowers. Apple also announced it would begin selling computers over the Internet as well as through retail stores and resellers. At the Internet-based Apple Store customers will be able to purchase built-to-order configurations of the G3 computers and possibly later other product lines.

Fortress bolsters VPN line

Fortress Technologies (formerly Digital Secured Networks Technology) this month announced an expansion of its virtual private network (VPN) security product line to include new software for secure remote access and centralized management of its VPN hardware products.

The new NetFortress Remote software is designed to keep remote users from having to manually encrypt sensitive communications when using the Internet to access their private networks. The remote product automatically encrypts communications when it recognizes the unique signature of the user's private network or other designated secure addresses.

The NetFortress Manager software is designed to provide users with the option of centrally managing the operation of the company's NetFortress VPN-1 or NetFortress VPN-3 two of the company's VPN products that are used by the Air Force the Army and the Navy.

The product lets systems administrators monitor network performance and make adjustments such as rebooting or shutting down NetFortress units revoking encryption keys testing encryption and performing network analysis company officials said.

Fortress already has begun posting beta versions of NetFortress Remote and NetFortress Manager to its World Wide Web site. Both products will begin shipping the first week of December.

Symantec adds virus software for Notes

Symantec Corp. one of two vendors tapped this summer to provide anti-virus software for all Defense Department users announced this month Norton AntiVirus for Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes the latest addition to the concern's anti-virus product suite.

The product is designed to work in real time to scan detect and repair viruses found in Notes databases and mail file attachments including pervasive macro viruses in Microsoft Corp.'s Word and Excel documents.While collaborative applications often act as a breeding ground for viruses Norton's product is designed to prevent virus infections from invading mission-critical groupware applications according to Symantec officials. The product includes Symantec's new Bloodhound technology which analyzes programs to detect known or new viruses.