Announcing the beta 2 public release of Forefront Security 2010 for Exchange Server

Article
04/16/2009

Hello. My name is Mitch Hall, and I am a program manager on the Forefront Server Security team. Today, we are proud to announce the release of Forefront Security 2010 for Exchange Server Beta 2 (FSE), which can be used with Exchange 2007 SP1 and Exchange 2010 beta 1. FSE provides industry leading antimalware protection by simultaneously using up to 5 individual antimalware engines. Protection is provided for both viruses and spyware. Protection is provided by 4 separate types of scanning processes: Transport, Realtime, Scheduled, and On-demand. Each type of scan can be configured to use a different set of engines, providing a balance of protection and performance.

FSE has additional antispam capabilities using the newly integrated Cloudmark engine. This engine along with connection, keyword, and file filtering provides a broad array of scanning and filtering capabilities. This solution provides industry leading spam protection.

FSE’s new UI delivers monitoring, configuration, and management capabilities. The monitoring section provides a dashboard displaying the individual engine status information. It also includes incidents and quarantine management screens. The monitoring section also provides for the configuration of incident and event notifications. The tasks section provides the ability to scan individual mailboxes or public folders. The Protection Settings panel allows the configuration of the scan processes, antispam , connection and recipient filtering. There is also a section for building file, sender, keyword, and domain filters. Finally, it contains sections for scan and engine update settings.

FSE’s UI is built on top of a fully scriptable PowerShell interface. This interface provides access to the full range of management capabilities through a programmatic interface. This interface can be leveraged for interactive use through the Forefront PowerShell console, or programmatically though PowerShell scripting or other .Net based programming language. Common tasks can be automated and integration can be achieved through this flexible interface.

The introduction of the Microsoft Forefront Management Console, codename Stirling, provides central management of client and server protection technologies through a unified interface. This interface allows administrators to create security policies that can be applied to different groups of clients and servers. Multiple policies can be created and associated with a group of nodes. This allows the administrator to create different policies settings for FSE Hub servers and FSE Mailbox servers.

The Stirling user interface provides a dashboard view that shows Protection Status, Policy Status, and security risk views. Stirling’s centralized data includes statistics, incidents, and quarantine for all nodes under management. This allows for the centralized management of incidents and quarantine across an enterprise. In addition to FSE’s traditional on premise antispam solutions, integration with Forefront Online Security for Exchange (formerly known as EHS) provides a hybrid on premise/hosted solution. This server provides a hosted scanning option with on premise management. This integration is currently offered via FSE integration with Stirling management. Details about Forefront Online Security for Exchange can be found at: https://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-hosted-services.mspx

Forefront Security 2010 for Exchange Server Beta 2 release is a great milestone in our commitment to deliver industry leading malware and spam protection with an integrated management experience.

Additional information can be found on our TechNet site:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/cc339029.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/forefront/stirling/default.aspx

The following Beta 2 downloads are now available:

Forefront Security for Exchange Server:

https://www.microsoft.com/forefront/serversecurity/exchange/en/us/next-generation.aspx

Forefront Security for SharePoint:

https://www.microsoft.com/forefront/serversecurity/sharepoint/en/us/next-generation.aspx

Forefront Stirling Management Server: https://www.microsoft.com/Forefront/stirling/en/us/default.aspx

Forefront Client Security:

https://www.microsoft.com/forefront/clientsecurity/en/us/next-generation.aspx

Forefront Threat Management/ISA: