Windows 7 Security Compliance Manager Released

The Security Compliance Manager is a new Solution Accelerator from Microsoft designed to streamline security baseline management for IT professionals. The first Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 security baselines were made available in October 2009, and the Redmond company has labored continuously in order to help IT pros bulletproof the environments they are responsible for. The past year, the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team released the Security Compliance Management Toolkit (SCMT) Series, an offering that has now evolved into the Security Compliance Manager.

“The Security Compliance Manager will help you accelerate knowledge to merge best practices, customize once to centralize decision making, and export to multiple formats to enable monitoring, verification, and compliance. The tool is designed to help accelerate your organization’s ability to efficiently manage the security and compliance process for the most widely used Microsoft technologies,” Stephen L. Rose, senior community manager, Windows IT Pro Client, revealed.

The Security Compliance Manager offers a single centralized location from where IT pros can automate security baseline administration. The tool brings to the table both guidance and documentation that will simplify tasks such as monitoring, verification and compliance. The Security Compliance Manager Beta Review Program went live on Microsoft Connect earlier this year, and, on April 8th, the software giant released the final version of the tool.

The Security Compliance Manager “will help you plan, deploy, operate, and manage your security baselines for Windows client and server operating systems, including Windows 7 security baselines, and Microsoft application baselines. You can access the complete database of Microsoft recommended security settings, customize your baselines, and then choose from multiple formats—including Desired Configuration Management (DCM) packs, Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), Microsoft Excel (XLS), or Group Policy objects (GPOs)—to export the baselines to your environment to automate the security baseline compliance verification process,” Rose added.