TechEd 2009: A Preview of Forefront TMG and URL Filtering

Hi Everyone:

As some of you may have noticed, Microsoft announced last week at the RSA Conference several partnerships and how Microsoft is introducing reputation services and providing these capabilities to our security products and solutions. Forefront TMG will be one of the first systems and workloads at Microsoft to leverage and utilize the reputation services to provide URL categorization, filtering, policy, reporting and blocking. I know many of the community have been waiting for this functionality to appear in TMG.

I am excited to share that we will be previewing our implementation and technology at TechEd in Los Angeles next week. We will be demonstrating this not only in my breakout session, but also in our booth in the pavilion. This will be a preview of our upcoming beta that will contain this functionality. The URL filtering is one of several key elements in our Secure Web Gateway (SWG) role of TMG. The secure web gateway role includes not only URL filtering and blocking, but also anti-virus/anti-malware scanning and blocking, HTTPS forward inspection and intrusion detection and response. This really creates a rich internet proxy that protects users from web browsing and Internet access threats from all angles. We have been impressed in our own deployment and usage during the beta inside of Microsoft of the threats and malware that have been detected and blocked by the gateway. Everything from infected documents on the web to "drive by" infected web sites when accessed by users legitimately.

I and several members of the team hope that we might be able to meet some of the community at the conference. Come check out the preview and provide some feedback first hand, we would love to hear it.

David B. Cross

Product Unit Manager