Security Products Leaving Support

Support for the Forefront line of antimalware products ends Dec. 31, 2015, having been 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 ([OCS] 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 but only 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 and will be updated to 2016 at the same time as Configuration Manager in the fourth quarter of 2015, after the release of Windows 10. Endpoint Protection will likely be discontinued with the next release of Windows Server (now expected in the second half of 2016) because that OS will probably include Windows Defender, which has similar capabilities.