How to upgrade your clients from Endpoint Security to BEST As you already know, Bitdefender is constantly improving its solutions in term of protection, performance and usability. The upgrade released in May brings a new Control Center with many developments to significantly enhance the customer’s experience. In addition, more features aiming to increase the flexibility and the simplicity of security management will be also available in the new client – Bitdefender Endpoint Security Tools (BEST).
Key additional features as part of BEST client: ∙ Device Control – Define different policies (allow/block/read only) for a wide range of computer peripherals to protect your business data. Special offer for existing customers: FREE OF CHARGE access ∙ Power User – Enable administration rights at user level, allowing the endpoint user to access and modify security settings via a local console. Special Promo for our current customers: FREE OF CHARGE access To benefit of all these new features, as an existing customer you just need to apply an update from the current version of the endpoint (Endpoint Security – version 5) to the new version (BEST – version 6) as follows:
1. First, you will need to find the machines protected by current version ‐ Bitdefender Endpoint Security. There are several methods through which you can find out these machines:
A. Use a Portlet in the Bitdefender Control Center Dashboard: ‐ Go to the Dashboard area of the Bitdefender Control Center ‐ Click on Add Portlet button from the upper left corner ‐ Select Upgrade Status in the Type drop‐down menu
‐ By default, the target of the Portlet is your Company, but you can select a different Company from the Select Targets area
‐ Once you have configured the Portlet settings, click on Save
‐ The Portlet will be added to the first free position in the Dashboard, which might not be on the first page. To browse through pages in the Dashboard, click on the right or left arrow from the lower left corner of the Dashboard area
‐ Once you see the Upgrade Status, if there are any upgradable Bitdefender Endpoint Security clients in the Company you have created the Portlet for, you will see an Upgrade button in the lower part of the Portlet.
B. Generate a Report in the Bitdefender Control Center: ‐ Go to Reports area of the Bitdefender Control Center ‐ Click on Add button from the upper left corner ‐ Select Upgrade Status in the Type drop‐down menu
‐ By default, the target of the Portlet is your Company, but you can select a different Company from the Select Targets area
‐ Once you have configured the Portlet settings, click on Generate
‐ If you have selected to generate the report Now, please wait for the report to be generated. ‐ If there are any upgradable Bitdefender Endpoint Security clients in the Company you have
created the Report for, you will see an Upgrade button in it
‐ Additionally, if you click on the down‐pointing arrow from the Upgrade Status column and select Not Upgraded, the Report will only show you the machines that are running the Endpoint Security client.
C. Manually checking the Bitdefender Endpoint client version in the Network list:
‐ Go to the Network area of the Bitdefender Control Center and click on the name of any of the Managed machines
‐ If the machine is running the Bitdefender Endpoint Security client, in the Agent ‐> Type part you will see Endpoint Security with red
‐ When hovering the mouse over the red exclamation mark next to Bitdefender Endpoint Security client, the console will let you know that the machine is not running the latest Bitdefender client version
‐ The exact text is: Upgrade available. It is recommended that you upgrade your agent to the new Bitdefender Endpoint Security Tools.
2. Now that we learned how to find the not upgraded machines, please make sure that Endpoint Security client is updated to a version that supports the upgrade task.
For the Bitdefender Endpoint Security client, this minimum version is 5.3.4.377 For the Bitdefender Endpoint Security Relay client, this version is 5.3.19.635
We recommend you to update the Bitdefender Endpoint Security client to the latest version before performing the upgrade, even if the clients have the minimum version mentioned above.
3. Perform the Upgrade
‐ Please know that performing the upgrade through a Portlet or a Report will not do this for machines running the Bitdefender Endpoint Security Relay. This exception was added as in most cases the Relay is the communication gateway for the endpoint clients, which means that the upgrade process will also be performed through the Relay and we need to maintain the same Relay version throughout the entire upgrade process.
‐ Using the Dashboard portlet or the Upgrade Status report you will be able to upgrade all Bitdefender Endpoint clients at once, but not the Bitdefender Endpoint Security Relays.
‐ If you want to upgrade a certain Endpoint client or the Bitdefender Endpoint Security Relay, then you need to do this from the Network area, by selecting this/these client(s) and run the upgrade task.
‐ We recommend you to enable the Automatically reboot (if needed) option, to make sure
the machine is restarted, in case the process needs it to finalize the upgrade process. Should you keep Automatically reboot (if needed) option disabled the machine will remain
unprotected until you perform the reboot in case it is needed to complete the process ‐ When it comes to servers protected by the Bitdefender Endpoint client, we recommend
planning the upgrade at a time when you can restart it, in case this action is requested by the Bitdefender installer.
‐ In the Credentials Manager list please add the admin credentials for that machine, which are necessary for this process. The credentials should be added in both forms shown in the screenshot from above (domain\user and user@domain)
‐ Once you click the Save button, you will see a mention in the upper part of the Bitdefender Control Center that the task was created and you can see its progress in the Tasks list.
4. Check the progress of the upgrade task
‐ This can be done by going to the Task area from the Bitdefender Control Center, then selecting the Install task that matches the time when you created the task
‐ Clicking on the hyperlink from the Status column will show you the status of the upgrade task for each machine
‐ As soon as the task finishes successfully, you will see in the Network list that the Endpoint Security client for the selected machine/s is BEST, just as you can see below.
