Security Products

The Forefront line of antimalware products was discontinued as of Dec. 1, 2012. No new versions will be released for Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server, Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint, and Forefront Security for Office Communications Server (which had been extended to provide some protection for Lync Server 2010). Support, including antimalware signature updates, will be provided for the discontinued products and for the older Antigen products until Dec. 31, 2015. The Protection Server Management Console 2010 (not shown) was also discontinued.

The Endpoint Protection product dropped the Forefront brand to become part of System Center 2012, and administrators must use the Configuration Manager console for central management of Endpoint Protection security updates and policies. Endpoint Protection was updated to 2012 R2 at the same time as the other System Center products. Endpoint Protection will likely be discontinued with the next release of Windows Server (now expected in the first half of 2016) because that OS includes Windows Defender, which has similar capabilities.