Forefront TMG Beta 2: 1 Week Later

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Hi ISA/TMG community:

I wanted to drop a quick note to the community this weekend and thank everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response and interest in Beta 2. We have been extremely excited by the extremely large number of downloads and feedback we have been receiving from the community. As great as Beta 2 is, I sitll have to say that some of the best is still yet to come with this release. We have been working hard behind the scenes listening to the community feedback, polishing our feature set and maybe even planning a few more technical surprises you will still have to wait and see.

With that said, I did want to highlight a very important aspect of TMG and this is in the area of mixed environment deployments. There has been some confusion intially by some of the community. The value proposition of TMG in protecting users from web threats is not limited to the Windows platform or even Internet Explorer users. TMG protects all users of the secure web gateway regardless of your platform or browsing environment. Download scanning, malware detection and vulnerability blocking are a value proposition that applies to your entire environment and no client side software is required to leverage this key feature! Give it a try with you mobile device or Apple notebook - we would love to hear your feedback.

Something we are also very excited about and looking forward to your feedback is our introduction of our Network Inspection System (NIS) in TMG Beta 2. NIS is an extremely innovative approach to intrustion detection, prevention and response especially when integreated with the Forefront codename "Stirling" security suite. NIS is based on some fantastic research and development from Microsoft Research called (GAPA). If you are interested to dive deep and learn more, you can read about it on the Microsoft Research site: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70223.

Well, that is all for this week. I will likely be checking back with everyone soon and sharing more of our thoughts and responding to feedback.

David B. Cross

Product Unit Manager