14 DAY TRIAL // As December 1st approaches, customers running Microsoft Forefront and Antigen products will need to take a series of steps in order to align themselves with the company’s strategy for items of the two product line-ups. The software giant announced on July 1st, that it would be revising its engine mix, and the deadline was the first day in December. According to Microsoft, the changes implemented are set up to boost detection, while optimizing protection for companies leveraging Forefront and Antigen.
“The AhnLab, CA, and Sophos engines will be retired on Dec. 1, 2009. After December 1st, customers will not receive any updates for these retired engines. In order to make sure your Antigen and Forefront products continue to scan efficiently and effectively for malware, any customers running the AhnLab, CA, or Sophos engines must DISABLE these engines before Dec. 1, 2009 and select from the new set of five engines – Authentium, Kaspersky, Microsoft, Norman, and VirusBuster,” revealed Brita Jenquin, senior product manager for Microsoft.
Come December 31st, 2009, Microsoft will modify the update infrastructure of Antigen for SharePoint 8.0 and Antigen for Instant Messaging 8.0. In this regard, the Redmond company is urging customers running the two security solutions to download the Service Pack 1 releases for each product ahead of December 1st. Only with SP1 deployed with Antigen for SharePoint 8.0 and Antigen for Instant Messaging 8.0 will continue to be updated correctly. Service Pack 1 releases for the two Antigen security products are available for download via the MVLS or VLSC site.
At the same time, Microsoft is retiring Antigen for Exchange 8.0 and Antigen for SMTP Gateways 8.0. As both solutions are scheduled to reach end of life on December 31st, 2009, Microsoft is pointing customers to Antigen 9.0 SP2 in exchange. Customers that will fail to upgrade will no longer receive anti-malware updates come January 1st, 2010.
In addition, Antigen and Forefront customers will no longer be able to rely on the Mail-Filters SpamCure antispam engine as of December 1, as it will be retired, too. Instead, Microsoft is switching to the Cloudmark antispam engine. According to the Redmond company, the move is designed to offer companies 99% detection rate for spam. At the same time, the Cloudmark antispam engine was found to provide less than 1 in 250,000 false positives.
“Customers using Antigen products for antispam protection must upgrade to the latest service pack releases listed below BEFORE DEC. 1, 2009 to maintain their antispam defenses. This is the only way to gain access to the new Cloudmark engine. The service packs can be accessed on the Microsoft MVLS and VLSC sites: Antigen for Exchange Server with Antigen Spam Manager 9.0 with SP2 and Antigen for SMTP Gateways with Antigen Spam Manager 9.0 with SP2,” Jenquin added.