Announcing the Availability of ISA/TMG Best Practices Analyzer Version 7

I am pleased to announce to the community that the next version of the Microsoft© ISA Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool (IsaBPA version 7) has been released and is now publicly available. Now the first question many people ask me is can this be used for the Forefront TMG beta: and the simple answer is yes!

For those of you who do not already know the ISA BPA or the history behind it, I have to give a lot of credit to the entire customer satisfaction and customer support teams around the globe that contribute to the shared global development of this tool. However, the “real man behind the curtains” is Idan Plonsky in the ISA/TMG customer satisfaction team that makes it all come together.

So what is new in Version 7 of IsaBPA?

ü New Checks – We have added 15 new IsaBPA rules, and are collecting almost all ISA/TMG properties as well as environmental properties (all in all we collect around 1500 settings). These settings are compared against ~235 rules. The focus on this release was targeting Configuration Storage Server and Active Directory authentication issues. This new suite joins Hardware, OS, Authentication, OWA, SSL Certificates; Site-to-site VPN with IPsec, WPLB, logging, NLB related issues and 3rd party software suites that were introduced in previous versions of IsaBPA.

ü Enhanced IsaBPA viewer - We have enhanced the IsaBPA configuration viewer, so it is now possible for Microsoft support engineers and the technically savvy ISA/TMG engineer to view the server configuration from the BPA report itself.

ü New IDP scenarios – The ISA Data Packager was enhanced to gather both IAG data as well as the ISA/TMG Firewall Client data. We also support data collection from Forefront TMG Medium Business Edition and above, and collect Configuration Change Tracking data.

ü BPA2Visio enhancement – The BPA2Visio visualization tool now includes BPA warnings and errors on the pictorial representation of the deployment in question, next to the violating links. Each node in the diagram contains now more data.

ü More documentation – The IsaBPA help file has been augmented to over 130 pages. You can easily find information about how to operate IsaBPA, information about specific checks, and how to fix issues that IsaBPA has detected.

ü Bug fixes – We fixed several bugs and issues that were discovered in previous versions.

IsaBPAv7 is available now online at http://isabpa.com. Note: The tool will require .NET 1.1 framework and above to be installed first. We are always excited to hear feedback and you can mail your comments, requests, information about bug reports, etc. to isabpa@microsoft.com alias.

David B. Cross

Product Unit Manager