Updating from 7.3 to 8.0.6 when Sophos is provided by Uni

Hello Deb_B,

if your university is providing the licensed version (i.e. AutoUpdate is set to download from the university) the have likely deliberately kept it at 7.3 for the time being - you have to check with them why. 

You could switch to the HE version by downloading it from the Sophos site - but then it's unmanaged and of course I can't say whether this would be ok for for your university or not.

Christian

Thanks. What does "unmanaged" mean?

Hello Deb_B,

What does "unmanaged" mean?

It's the opposite of managed :smileywink:. Seriously - a managed installation updates from the site's server(s), to a certain extent the site has control over which version to deploy. Clients will report their version (OS and SAV) and SAV status to a central server ("Console"). Policies (i.e. the various settings) are centrally set, if you make changes your Mac will alert the Console. Details of detections will also be sent, and if they haven't been dealt with (cleaned or deleted) an appropriate action can in many cases be initiated from the Console.

Thus your university might prefer to know about the health of your SAV and to the extent described be able to monitor and manage it. Dunno about their general and support policies though.

Christian   

I think his question is the same as the one we have here:   We have the "enterprise" version of Sophos -- where we get updates from Sophos directly. 

We're all wondering when our 7.3.x installs will automatically update to 8.0.x.    The "fixed" version of 8.0.6 appears to be out (the one that keeps the shield in the menu bar for Mac OSX 10.8 installs), but this is not showing up as an automatic update for 7.3.x installs yet.

The Enterprise edition uses a different update mechanism from the Home edition.  There are two variants of the Enterprise version -- stand-alone, and managed.  The stand-alone version should have auto-updated to 8.0.x at the end of July; the managed version updates when the person managing the enterprise console for your organisation decides to flip the switch and point your updates at the new version.  Eventually 7.3.12 will reach end-of-life, at which point those using the managed installs will have to upgrade.  Until then, they still have the choice to run 7.3.x and not upgrade.

That's not the case.

We have the stand-alone version of Enterprise Sophos 7.3.x here -- it gets it's updates directly from the Sophos repository.

It does not auto-update (still).   Sophos Tech Support keeps promising this is coming, but it has yet to happen...

Maybe the *home* version auto-updates, but the stand-alone Enterprise -- does not.

Don't want to second-guess Andrew - but if the version handling (SEC vs. stand-alone) hasn't changed it should be the other way round:
When a new version of a product comes out it is:

• default for new installations of SEC (with the old one still selectable)
• available for flipping during the first months (during this period a site can decide to roll out the new version, if they do nothing Recommended stays the "old" current version)
• after roughly three months "force ungraded" for all sites which have not explicitly elected to stay on the "old" product line
• again after a few months made "mandatory" (i.e. the old version is retired, sites still using it will receive an alert); it's only then that stand-alone users will be upgraded

As said, this is how I think it worked and still works.

For 7.3 there's currently just 7.3.12 which suggests that there won't be any more 7.3 releases and thus the switch will take place with the October update.

Christian

Second-guess away :)  As far as I can tell, Christian is correct -- my previous statement is not.  From what I can tell, 7.3.12 will not be force upgraded until 8.0.8 at the earliest.