LAS VEGAS, Nevada. - April 29, 2008 -- At the Interop conference today, Microsoft announced its next-generation secure remote access gateway product, Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG), available in the first half of 2009. Forefront Unified Access Gateway is the evolution of Microsoft's current solution, Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG 2007), and moves the successful product under the Forefront brand. UAG will bring new features and functionality to make remote access easier than ever for all users and IT professionals. In addition to investing strongly in its next-generation solutions, Microsoft is continuing to provide increased customer value with the products in the market today by launching an updated SharePoint Optimizer, providing enhanced functionality and manageability for secure remote access to SharePoint by all mobile users.
Built on Windows Server 2008, UAG is designed to offer one solution to fit all remote access needs through centralized management and policy control across all users, devices, and network resources. More details about the features in Forefront UAG will be available with a public beta scheduled for later this calendar year. Microsoft will provide an easy product and licensing upgrade path from IAG 2007 or customers using ISA 2006 for remote access to Forefront UAG, and IAG customers that have or buy Microsoft Software Assurance can be confident of receiving strong value with Forefront UAG.
Forefront UAG will add further features to a comprehensive end point security assessment and cache cleanup, which is tailored to the specific application and access environment. Tightly integrated with Microsoft Network Access Protection, this ensures only secure devices and authenticated users can access network resources and that no data is compromised during or after the sessions.
Forefront UAG adds more ease of use with wizard driven configuration, easy to use policies and highly intuitive user experience. This solution ensures a fast and easy deployment allowing employees, partners and vendors simple and secure access, via customized and dynamic user portals. Ongoing management and control is simplified via updates to application and endpoint policies.
The IAG pioneered the concept of Application Intelligence, or the ability to control what resources are presented to the user, and transparently enforcing policies based on a deep understanding of how an application functions. Forefront UAG builds on the current competitive differentiation around application intelligence, with broad application support for Microsoft and third party applications, granular access controls, and customizable application protection through Application Optimizers.
Microsoft latest Application Optimizers is an updated SharePoint Optimizer for the IAG 2007, providing enhanced functionality and performance for remote access to SharePoint by all mobile users. The updated IAG 2007 SharePoint Optimizer leverages SharePoint Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) to provide an easier, more secure and productive user experience when accessing SharePoint remotely.
With this new Optimizer, IAG provides more seamless access to the complete functionality of SharePoint, including Explorer View, Datasheet View, integrating InfoPath forms and access to multiple office documents from multiple server locations, without the overhead and security risks associated with tunneling and application rewriting.
Microsoft's IAG 2007 already provides the easiest to use and manage remote access to SharePoint today, as it is the only complete remote access solution to integrate its user experience into SharePoint, allowing organizations to keep a simple, one-portal, user experience for employees accessing applications internally or externally. The IAG 2007 SharePoint Optimizer will be available for download in May.
Our Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) has just released the latest Security Intelligence Report for July through December. The report has a number of interesting findings, but the most eye-popping is a 300 percent increase in Trojans, using our enormous sample size of 450 million computers:
During the second half of 2007 there was a 300% increase in the number of Trojan downloaders and droppers detected and removed. The increase observed in 2H07 is vastly larger than the already large increase observed between 2H06 and 1H07. Clearly this category of malware has become a tool of choice for some attackers. IT Professionals and Security Professionals alike should become familiar with this type of malware so that they can better protect their networks from attacks that leverage it.
We're sure glad we have some of the best anti-malware researchers in the world building our anti-malware engine for Forefront Client Security.
Hey everyone,
My name is Danny Popper, and I’m a Program Manager for Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server. On Wednesday, Brett (our Product Unit Manager) blogged about our brand new beta release of two Forefront Server Security products – Forefront Security for Exchange Server (FSE) and Forefront Security for SharePoint (FSSP). Brett talked about our direction both from the broader Forefront division of security products as well as from the perspective of our two products. I want to build on what Brett said, and I hope that I can fill in some of the details about how we’re going to achieve the visions he outlined.
There's more...
We've just released Forefront Security for SharePoint with Service Pack 2, which now provides support for Windows Server 2008. Windows Server 2008 is the most secure server operating system yet, offering a strong platform for FSSP.
In addition to a number of other upgrades and improvements, FSSP SP2 offers installable key word lists for automatically blocking documents containing profanity and discriminatory content in 11 languages -- English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian.
Now you can protect your SharePoint installations around the world from corporate potty mouths. And you can get as granular as you want - from the really nasty down to "damn" - or "damner," "verdammt," "maldita," "maldito," depending on which country you're in.
Check it out here:
At RSA, the Forefront team announced the public beta of our next-generation Forefront security solution, codenamed "Stirling".
Stirling is an integrated security system that delivers comprehensive, coordinated protection, to make it easier to control, access and manage security across an organization’s IT infrastructure.
Stirling combines a central management console for security configuration and enterprise-wide visibility with the next-generation Forefront products that span the client, server and network edge. These products include Forefront Client Security, Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint and the next-generation of Microsoft ISA Server – Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG).
We will be talking to you more about Stirling in the coming days and weeks, but here are some resources to help you learn more about the integrated solution today.
Demo: Our very own Josue Fontanez demonstrates Stirling.
Get the beta: To download the beta click here.