Security Products Overview

Major changes to the plans for the Forefront line of products were announced in Apr. 2010. The planned “Stirling” wave of integrated products and suites will not be released. Specifically, Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 will not be offered as a stand-alone product but will instead be an add-on to Configuration Manager in late 2010 and may be merged into Configuration Manager in the next release in 2011. Administrators will be able to use the Configuration Manager console to centrally manage security updates and policies.

For protecting Microsoft application servers, Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server and Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint were released at the same times as their corresponding servers in Nov. 2009 and May 2010, respectively.

In Mar. 2009, Microsoft released Forefront 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 Forefront Protection 2011 for Communications Server here, will likely appear in conjunction with the next release of Communications Server, expected in late 2010 at the earliest.