We are happy to announce Forefront UAG 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and the availability of its final release candidate. This service pack includes many enhancements to the product, designed to ease DirectAccess deployments and to enable secure collaboration scenarios using Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0.

Among the new features for DirectAccess:

• One-time-password support for DirectAccess.
• Simplified DirectAccess deployment with an improved admin UI, which includes new functionality that previously required scripting and manual tweaking.
• Increased flexibility in creating and distributing DirectAccess Group Policy Objects (GPO)
• Support for DirectAccess deployments which enable only the “always managed” functionality, allowing remote management of the DirectAccess client machines from the Corporate network without also enabling corporate access for the DirectAccess clients
• Support for forced tunneling, which means that all of the traffic from DirectAccess clients is routed through the DirectAccess server to the corporate network, and from there, if needed, back to the Internet.
• Integration of the DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant (DCA) configuration and deployment into the admin process.
• Integrated NAP for simplified endpoint policy enforcement.
• Improved monitoring and troubleshooting by adding new DCA diagnostics and server-side reports.

The new AD FS 2.0 secure collaboration scenarios in SP1 enable the following:

• One-time-password support for DirectAccess.
• Claims-based authentication to the UAG portal
• Publishing of claims-aware applications
• Claims-based authorization
• SSO to legacy applications for users authenticated using claims
• Single Sign-out
• Publishing AD FS 2.0 server

SP1 is not only about features – it’s also about the user experience and the quality of the product. We addressed many customer requests and improved the stability and robustness of the system – not only for the new functionality but also for the existing scenarios. We also invested in completing the localization of the end-user experience. We are confident that you and your users will notice the improvement.

You can start experimenting with UAG 2010 SP1 RC right now by downloading the Release Candidate (RC). It includes all of the new features and is available both as an upgrade from a previous UAG 2010 releases, or as a clean install. You can find updated documentation that reflects all SP1 changes in our TechNet Library. We recommend you begin with the new installation guide.

We are eager to get your feedback and to assist with your deployments via our TechNet forum. Our team as well as our MVPs and partners monitor the forum. Please post any issues you might encounter. Compliments are also welcome ;-)

Over the next few weeks we will publish a series of blog posts to introduce SP1. Stay tuned!