SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Security - Manage Antivirus Settings

When you click on 'Specify Web Application user policy link', you will land on an antivirus page. This page will let you manage the antivirus settings (i.e. document scanning on upload or download etc.) for the SharePoint farm.

Antivirus settings page’s direct link - /_admin/AVAdmin.aspx

In today’s world, we have security threats at all the times and as a SharePoint administrator it is our responsibility to protect the SharePoint environment. If a virus or malware makes it to SharePoint, it can cause a lot of damage, from the corruption of the environment or data loss or theft. To protect SharePoint farm, we have to implement the antivirus in the environment. There are many antiviruses available in the market, where you need to pick any one, which fullfils your requirement.

Note

These settings will not take effect, until you have an antivirus solution installed on all the Web front Servers in SharePoint farm.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you enable the scanning option, you will see some performance issues. Every time you upload or download a document, it will be scanned. 

You can control the antivirus settings on this page. The following settings can be configured. 

Scan documents on upload

If you enable this setting, then every time you upload a document or save a document, installed antivirus software will scan it. By default, this setting is disabled.

Scan documents on download

If you enable this option, then every time the user downloads a document, then the installed antivirus software will scan it. By default, this option is disabled.

Allow users to download infected documents

By default, this option is enabled, which means even if a document is infected by a virus, it will allow the user to download the files.

Attempt to clean the infected documents

If you allow users to download infected documents, then you can check this option, which allows an installed antivirus to clean the document. If you don’t allow the user to download the infected documents, then if a clean up attempt fails, then the user will not be able to download them.

Antivirus Time Out

We can also set a time out setting, which helps us to keep the best performance in SharePoint. With this setting, we tell antivirus that after a set time, it will be timed out. By default, the value is 300 seconds.

Antivirus Thread

You can control the number of threads antivirus can start. By default, 5 threads setting is configured. You have to be careful about these settings, because it can hurt the performance of the servers.

To configure the antivirus settings, please follow the steps given below.

• Login on central admin with an account which is a part of the farm administrator group.
• On an antivirus page, please configure the options given below.
  
  
  1. Scan the documents on upload.
  2. Scan the documents on download.
  3. Allow the user to download infected documents.
  4. Attempt to clean the infected documents.
  5. Antivirus timeout.
  6. Antivirus threads.
  7. Click OK.
     
      

This will configure the settings for antivirus. As I said earlier, these settings will not take effect, until you install the antivirus software on all Web front ends. You have to be careful with these settings, as it can put more pressure on the SharePoint server and hurt performance.