When a vendor calls its product Worry-Free, sceptics (like me) tend to reach for a pinch of salt. The latest version, however, has some interesting new features that look like they really could help take the worry out of protecting users and their resources on a small business network.

As with earlier versions of Worry-Free, what you get with V6.0 of the company's Business Security suite is an integrated set of tools designed to protect against a range of common Internet threats. That's everything from viruses and spam to spyware and bot networks, together with phishing and other social engineering attacks.

A standard client/server model is employed with distributed security agents to protect both individual Windows PCs and shared servers. An agent for Exchange email servers is also included as standard along with, in the Advanced edition (starting at £263 + VAT for 5 users), a licence for Trend's InterScan Messaging Hosted Security, to protect other local and hosted email systems.

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A Windows-based security server located on the local network is used to deploy, update and manage the Worry-Free security agents, with a Web-based console for remote access. And buyers can either do it all themselves or pay a reseller to setup the software and, if wanted, manage it remotely.

Nothing special so far and, if you were looking at an earlier release, that'd be your lot. However, there are a couple of new twists in version 6.0 that change things, the real scene stealer being a technology called Smart Scan.

What Smart Scan does is offload the bulk of the scanning involved in trapping things like viruses and spam. To this end individual clients only ever concern themselves with rapidly mutating malware - around about 20 percent of potential threats - whilst scanning for the remaining 80 percent is handled either by a security server on the local network or, for users out of the office, a Trend service in the 'cloud'.

There's nothing to configure, Smart Scan making the Worry-Free client a lot less intrusive than other competitive products. Indeed when we tried it out on a real company LAN few of the users noticed the software was there, with some even commenting on how much quicker their PCs had become. It also makes for easier and more timely delivery of updates, with no need for signatures to be maintained on every PC on the LAN.

Smart Scan, however, isn't the only improvement. The client can also be set to pause scanning when CPU usage is high and feed discovered threat information back to the Trend Micro developers for more rapid production of new updates.

URL filtering and website blocking have also been added along with the ability to secure USB storage devices and filter Instant Messaging content. A graphical tool for quarantine management is yet another new feature, while the main console has also been tidied up and made easier to use.

On the downside, Worry-Free remains a Windows only solution and distributing the agents isn't always easy. But there's a lot in the new release to like, it needs little day to day management and it compares well against the market leaders in terms of both functionality and price.

The new Smart Scan technology in Worry-Free Business Security 6.0 lifts the Trend Micro security suite above the competition, making it less demanding on client resources and quicker to update. CPU-sensitive throttling is another useful new feature, along with URL filtering and USB device control. The lack of support for anything but Windows could be an issue for some, but for most small businesses it otherwise ticks all the boxes.