Many great things have happened this year with the Forefront team, so we’d like to have a quick recap in case you missed any of it.  Overall, Forefront helps companies save money through improving security, increasing productivity, and reducing their costs.  Below are the list of products which have been released with a short description of what they do to help achieve these goals.

Newly Released Products in 2009:

  • Forefront Security for Office Communication Server (FSOCS) : March – Secures your instant messaging traffic from OCS AND from third parties, such as AOL, Live Messenger, etc.
  • Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE) and Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) : November – Reduce your email SPAM, make your email more secure, and save costs.
    The key differentiating factors are:
    • Multiple malware protection engines allowing for removal of a single point of failure in Exchange organizations
    • Layered antispam defense with new content filtering engine producing above 99% spam catch rate (based on WestCoast Labs and Virus Bulletin evaluations)
    • Hybrid Model with seamless Forefront Online Protection services integration
    • Ease of monitoring, reporting, and administration via new powershell-driven UI
    • Hyper-V support
    • Significant performance improvements in engines Context Switches, CPU utilization, messaging throughput, and memory management
  • Threat Management Gateway (TMG) : November – Protect your network against zero-day attacks and unmanaged clients with NIS and be more secure and more productive with URL filtering. Protect even non-Microsoft clients with anti-malware inspection on downloads.
  • Unified Access Gateway (UAG) released : December – Enable and extend secure remote connectivity into your corporate network.  UAG scales Windows Server 2008 R2's direct access.

Products which will release in 2010, but had pre-release versions in 2009:

  • Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) @ Release Candidate 1
  • Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (FEP) @ Beta 3
  • Forefront Protection for SharePoint (FPSP) @ Beta 2
  • Forefront Protection Manager (FPM) @ Beta 3

Some Customer Highlights:

  • Magnus Bjork, Exchange consultant at Mailmaster.se – always recommends FPE or FOPE to his customers because of the ability to more thoroughly detect malware through multi-engine scanning.
  • Edinburgh Napier University – reduced spam by 85 percent and lowered the administrative burden for IT Staff by 93 percent by moving from their old SPAM filtering solution to FOPE.
  • PEI Cobb Freed & Partners - “TMG is a perfect tool for us to protect our clients and servers from malware and web based threats, and it doesn’t require the additional IT manpower required by more complex systems. Everything is configurable in an easy to use and understand GUI. We are finding this to be a great security product to use without any of the hassles usually involved.”

Read more Forefront customer highlights