Forefront Protection Manager Will Not Be Released to Market

A new offering will be made available to Exchange and SharePoint customers in the future to help them deal with security management, but that won’t be Forefront Protection Manager. The Redmond company announced on April 20, 2010, that Forefront Protection Manager would not be released to the market, although, at one point, plans were to deliver FPM in the first half of 2010. Microsoft cited the need to align its Forefront security management strategy with the evolution of enterprise IT. This translates into the alignment of security management with systems and application management. It would help simplify the security experience and manage compliance, Microsoft underlined.

“Multi-server management for Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE) and Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint (FPSP) will be delivered through a streamlined solution for messaging and collaboration workloads, both on-premises and in the cloud. We will share additional details on this solution in the future,” a member of the Forefront team noted.

At the same time, the software giant is not leaving customers hang out to dry. A few releases are planned for the second half of this year, all of them free of charge for existing FPE and FPSP customers. Support for FPE and FPSP multi-server management will be added through a Service Pack designed to integrate with the Forefront Server Security Management Console (FSSMC). In addition, Microsoft will also provide a Forefront Server Security Script Kit that will make possible the configuration and reporting on multiple FPE and FPSP deployments via Remote PowerShell.

“We are aligning security management with systems and application management at two levels. The first level will deliver risk management across protection, access, and identity, providing end-to-end visibility into the enterprise and helping enable compliance. The second level will operationalize and simplify security management by building on application workloads and providing a consistent management experience across physical, virtual, and cloud environments,” the Forefront team representative added.