Microsoft Antigen 9 Service Pack 1 Now Available
So you have heard that Microsoft Antigen 9 Service Pack 1 is available. You are probably asking “So what does that mean to me?” or “That’s great, but why should I install this thing?” To find out the answers, keep reading. But a quick check first. Are you running Exchange 2007? If so, please visit the Microsoft Forefront Server page for information about downloading Forefront for Exchange Server with SP1. Microsoft Antigen support Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 only.
Antigen 9 SP1 includes the following features:
1. Enhanced cluster installations – There were some issues with installing Antigen on a cluster. The fixes to address those issues (previously only available in the 9.0.1055.64) are now available in a complete release package.
2. Wide Character Support (Globalization) – Antigen 9 SP1 has support for Unicode characters. This means that things such as filter lists names or tag text can be named using local language characters. The product is still an English product and is limited to English-only install directories, but Unicode is accepted pretty much everywhere else.
3. Rollup of existing bug fixes – Every hot fix that has been released to customers has been rolled into this release.
4. Software updates via Microsoft Update – Antigen 9 SP1 can now be have product software updates done automatically by Microsoft Update.
5. Office 12 File support – We have added some support for the Office 12 file formats. We can now identify Office 12 files as such instead of treating them as corrupted compressed.
6. Deprecated the CA Iris engine – CA recently has dropped support for the CA Iris engine by incorporating the functionality that CA Iris provided into the CA Vet engine. Consolidating the engines means there’s one less engine to update and you still get the same functionality!
7. Improved license renewal – Antigen 9 SP1 now has the ability to accept your Volume Licensing user agreement number and expiration date. This allows you to renew Antigen without getting a license file. Simply enter the new agreement number and expiration date and you are ready to go.
8. Changed Default SpamCure update frequency to 15 minutes – A common problem with spam detection is not updating spam signatures often enough. The default update frequency has been changed form once a day to every 15 minutes, thus improving spam detection out of the box.
9. The engine update scheduler only creates one scheduled job for each engine – In previous versions of Antigen the AT scheduler was used to manage engine update schedules. This resulted in many, many jobs being listed in the AT scheduler. In Antigen 9 SP1 we utilize SCHTASKS which allows for recurring tasks and one scheduled task per engine update!
So there you have it, nine great reasons to install Microsoft Antigen 9 SP1.
Please visit https://www.microsoft.com/antigen/default.mspx to download an evaluation version of Antigen for Exchange with ASM or Antigen for SMTP Gateways with ASM. Antigen 9 SP1 will be available for subscription download via MVLS after January 1st.
For our current Sybari customers, please visit Sybari.com and log in using your user name and password to obtain your copy of Antigen 9 with SP1.
If you have questions that you think can be answered via the Antigen community, please visit the Antigen forum at https://forums.microsoft.com/forefront.
Tom Canino
Lead Program Manager
Forefront Server Security