The Road to RC Needs Telemetry

Hello Community:

I wanted to provide an update to everyone where we are at with the upcoming release and also put out a call to action for some help. First of all, an update on the product release. We have just internally completed our escrow test pass cycle for the upcoming release candidate (RC) version. We have been running TMG under stress conditions, incorporating critical customer feedback and most importantly, “eating our own dogfood”. We are putting the final touches on the build and putting it through its final paces to ensure any customer can put this release into production on day one. As soon as it is ready, I will let everyone know.

However, we do need some help before then. As we announced in a previous posting about telemetry for URL filtering and the Microsoft Reputation Service (MRS), we need more data and feedback to improve the coverage and accuracy of our URL filtering offering. This is critical so that we can adjust the service and results to match the wide audience we serve with the Forefront TMG product.

My ask to the community is the following: If you have installed or deployed TMG Beta 3 and are using the URL filtering capability of the proxy, please take a moment to download and install the URL filtering telemetry package.

The upcoming RC release will have this telemetry natively included, but until then, we really need your data and feedback to ensure we have the best possible product for your specific needs when we release.

Thanks for your continued support and feedback. I hope to see many of you when we officially launch Forefront TMG at TechEd Europe in November. I know I will be there!

David B. Cross

Product Unit Manager

Forefront TMG