Forefront Security Products

Major changes to the plans for the security products were announced in Apr. 2010. Endpoint Protection 2010 is an add-on to Configuration Manager. Administrators are required to use the Configuration Manager console to centrally manage security updates and policies. Future updates to Endpoint Protection will be tied to Configuration Manager and the product will drop the Forefront brand to become part of System Center beginning with the 2012 release.

For protecting Microsoft application servers, Protection 2010 for Exchange Server and Protection 2010 for SharePoint were released at the same times as their corresponding servers in Nov. 2009 and May 2010, respectively. Future releases of these protection products will likely coincide with new versions of their respective servers in 2013 and then 2016. These two Forefront products (but only these two) can be managed centrally using Protection Server Management Console 2010.

In Mar. 2009, Microsoft released Security for Communications Server, which supports Communications Server 2007 and 2007 R2. (The previous product, Antigen for Instant Messaging, is not compatible with Communications Server 2007.) A new version, called Protection 2012 for Lync Server here, will likely appear in 2012 for protection of the latest release of Communications Server, called Lync Server 2010.