Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 Service Pack 1

Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 Service Pack 1 was released at 6/23/2010.
The service pack includes the following new features and feature improvements:

New Reports
• The new User Activity report displays the sites and site categories accessed by any user.
• All Forefront TMG reports have a new look and feel.

Enhancements to URL Filtering
• You can now allow users to override the access restriction on sites blocked by URL filtering. This allows for a more flexible web access policy, in that users can decide for themselves whether to access a blocked site. This is especially useful for websites that have been incorrectly categorized.
• You can now override the categorization of a URL on the enterprise level; the override is then effective for each enterprise-joined array.
• Denial notification pages can now be customized for your organization’s needs.

Enhanced Branch Office Support
• Collocation of Forefront TMG and a domain controller on the same server, which can help reduce the total cost of ownership at branch offices.
• When installed on a computer running Windows Server 2008 R2, SP1 simplifies the deployment of BranchCache at the branch office, using Forefront TMG as the Hosted Cache server.

Support for publishing SharePoint 2010
• Forefront TMG SP1 supports secure publishing of SharePoint 2010.

Read some interesting articles about the new features included in TMG SP1:
Forefront TMG (ISA Server) Product Team Blog
Forefront Team Blog
Richard Hicks

TechEd 2010 Virtualization Sessions

Here’s some interesting sessions for virtualization from TechEd.

Networking and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Deployment Considerations

 

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2: Advanced Virtualization Management

The Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Top 20 Must-Have Customizations

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager: Monitoring the Service Stack

See the Largest Mission Critical Deployment of Microsoft SQL Server around the World

Check the Latest Videos from TechEd North America

Have Fun 😀

Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Access Protection

Yuri and Tom describe how Forefront Threat Management Gateway is a web access protection solution. They dive into:
HTTPS inspection: privacy concerns, how it works
Process of how TMG protects unmanaged clients against malware
Basics on URL Filtering and NIS
Check out the TMG Book
Download a trial of TMG

Check out the video 🙂

Forefront TMG 2010 Capacity Planning Tool

MS Forefront TMG launches 2 tools to help you with hardware seizing requirements:

– Forefront TMG 2010 hardware recommendations­ TechNet article – Shows hardware recommendations for common deployment scenarios, and design considerations specific to Forefront TMG that are relevant for any size deployment.

– Forefront TMG 2010 Capacity Planning Tool – Shows hardware recommendations for enterprise and high bandwidth deployments.

The Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 Capacity Planning Tool helps customers understand what hardware they need in order to support the number of users, wide area network bandwidth, features and protections enabled in their Forefront TMG 2010 deployment.