I'm currently evaluating SEP Small Business Edition 2013 as a possible replacement of another brand of network antivirus system.
I set up a test environment with one Windows 2008R2 fileserver running the SEPM management console, and being a protected endpoint itself as well... and pushed out the client install to a handful of Windows 7 workstations (all 64-bit). Everything about this installation was using all the default values, to keep the installation as "bone stock" as possible.
After all was installed and up and running, I noticed that all the managed clients initially installed with an April 2013 set of virus definitions. After trying to get all the machines to update their virus defs, I noticed that each and every machine was trying to reach out over the public Internet individually to download their virus defs with "Live Update", much like a bunch of standalone home PCs, each with it's own Internet connection. It ended up totally swamping my poor little thin Internet feed in the test lab environment.
Well, this method of updating the managed clients simply is not going to work in my network at all. All other network antivirus softwares I've worked with have the local management server fetch the virus definition and other component updates on a schedule from the vendor's server over the Internet, and then keep local copies of these defs and component updates on that internal server for redistribution... then all the managed clients on the internal LAN point to that local management server to get their updates so you don't have this situation where all your internal machines are all trying to individually do their own thing trying download their updates from the outside world.
Is there some easy way to configure SEPM as a local fetcher/redistributer of definition and component updates? I looked around in the software a bit, but nothing really jumped out as an obvious configuration solution, like in the other brands of antivirus software I'm looking at where such a concept is blatantly obvious in the configs.
If SEPM cannot be made to handle these updates as a local downloader/repository/redistributor of updates to the managed clients, and the clients have to download their updates individually from the outside world, then this is going to be an awfully short evaluation of the product.