Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange and SharePoint

Microsoft needs to sit back and think carefully about how it intends to deploy all of this. A single management policy engine that will deploy settings to all the security products is what customers need. They do not need this proliferation of point solutions. To be able to set the rules by which any product can move a file around the network and then deploy that as a Group Policy object would be very cool and it is hoped that Microsoft is moving that way.

Forefront Server as an integrated process inside Exchange and SharePoint is a good thing. These are the two locations where there is a vast amount of incoming data and where it would be a disaster should any malware or virus get uploaded.

Having deployed multiple copies of Forefront on VMs just to see how well it works together and what the management overhead is, I'm very disappointed. Microsoft seems to have completely misjudged the market here.

Looking forward to the post-Windows Server 2008 launch, when the Forefront product family - servers, client, management - are all available and integrated, this will be a solution to seriously consider. Today, it's something to look at but I wouldn't want to base my security on it just yet.