I recently rolled out an install of the Symantec PGP Universal Server with Whole Disk Encryption. This was a pretty straight forward install and suited my customers needs for fully encrypting the data on all laptops that went out of the office. It supports 256 bit encryption and can also encrypt all email as well as any USB device that a user attaches to it. The basic premise of needing this software is that you have business critical data on laptops that is sensitive if a computer is lost or stolen.
The Server portion of the install is a Linux based self contained server that self installs off of a DVD. We did the install in a VM which also went off without a hitch. Once installed, you simply remote in to the web console and configure the settings that you want for the client. We only had licenses for the Whole Disk Encryption so that is what we focused on. The server supports single sign-on as well as all OS’s such as Linux, Windows and even Mac. Once completed, we simply downloaded an msi installer that can either be run on individual clients or pushed out via group policy or any other system management tool. We found that there were some things that we missed which is no problem. The default for the client to check back with the server is every 24 hours, but this can be adjusted. You simply make any changes to the policy that you want, then you can either wait for the automatic update to happen, or you can force it by syncing the client to the server.
Overall, this is a great solution for anyone who needs to have solid endpoint encryption for their hardware. I would give it a 7 out of 10 for ease of use as the web console can be a bit confusing. Since we were only using the encryption portion of the software, the rest of the options just got in the way.