If you haven’t visited our online forums you’ve been missing out. We have over 52,000 registered users and over 280,000 posts on the forums page! Check out the forums at http://forums.isaserver.org Tom asked me if I could get a new forum up on the site – this forum is dedicated to the UAG DirectAccess feature. more..... more »

What happened to FWENGMON? You know, the tool we used to see what was going on with the ISA Firewall Engine. It’s gone. Well, it’s still in ISA, but you won’t find it in your TMG firewall anywhere. more..... more »

“The firewall engine (fweng.sys) and firewall service (wspsrv.exe) share an implementation of the rules engine (the component that decides if the current policy allows the traffic or not). When matching traffic to policy rules, some aspects cannot be matched by the firewall engine because performing blocked operations is not allowed in the ke.. more »

Cool! The Forefront Edge Team has put together a nice newsletter on what’s going on with Forefront Edge products, technologies and documentation. There is even some coverage of the recent Forefront MVP get together during the World Wide MVP Summit. Check it out at: ht.. more »

I remember way back when I was working with Windows 95 clients and playing with the VPN capabilities included with that system. I don’t remember if VPN came with Windows 95 at RTM – I think that was a feature added well after the RTM release. I would play with connecting it to Windows NT, and it worked great. Even connected it to the Internet. That.. more »

Take a look at this: It’s a new method of communicating documentation that allows you to interact with the process. more..... more »

A lot of the magic that goes into making DirectAccess with UAG (and even with Windows) work are the dozens of settings that are enabled through Group Policy Object settings. Group Policy is responsible for configuring the UAG DA server, the DA clients and the servers that are in the group that are enabled for end-to-end security. Ben Bernstein .. more »

Like it’s predecessors, the TMG firewall is now in Common Criteria evaluation. You can check out the details over at: http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2010/02/25/forefront-tmg-in-common-criteria-evaluation.aspx HTH, Deb DEBRA LITTLEJOHN SHINDERMVP (Enterprise Security)“MS SECURITY”dshinder@isaserver.org. more..... more »

As you can imagine, the tech talk in our home gets pretty interesting at times. For years the talk centered around ISA and then TMG firewalls. Of course we still love our ISA and TMG firewalls, but from listening to Tom talk, it sounds like the Forefront Unified Access Gateway has a bright future. Since I like bright and shiny things as much as the .. more »

Hey! I just wanted to let you know Tom has started a new blog on the Microsoft TechNet blogger site. Check out his first article: Why Microsoft DirectAccess Represents a Real Paradigm Shift at: http://blogs.technet.com/tomshinder/archive/2010/02/24/why-microsoft-directaccess-represents-a-real-paradigm-shift.aspx HTH, Deb DEBRA LITTLEJOHN SHINDERMVP .. more »

I remember when ISA Server 2006 SP1 was released that one of my favorite new features was the introduction of the Test Button. This Test Button allowed me to test my rules before I deployed them. While there were some limitations to the Test Button feature, there were still a number of times when the Test found something wrong before I actually .. more »

The Microsoft DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant (DCA) helps organizations reduce the cost of supporting DirectAccess users and significantly improve their connectivity experience. This Solution Accelerator is part of the Windows Optimized Desktop Toolkit 2010 (WODT 2010). The Microsoft DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant (DCA) helps organizations .. more »

Jim, Mohit, Yuri and Tom are done with the TMG book and it’s available for purchase now. But maybe you’re not sure this is the book for you? What better way to find out then checking out some sample chapters? Microsoft Press has made available to you some sample chapters of the Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) Administrator’s Compan.. more »

With the ISA firewall, you could add and remove routing table entries using the Route Add and Route Delete commands. We’ve been doing it that way for years and years – it’s tried and true, we know how it works, and it always (almost) does what it’s supposed to do. more..... more »

Richard Hicks, the only US based Forefront TMG MVP recently participated in an interview with RunAs radio. Richard does a great job expressing the value TMG provides organizations of all sizes, and most importantly, refers to the TMG firewall as the “TMG firewall” :) In addition, Richard provides some nice information about the Forefront Unif.. more »

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. The hardware requirements for servers running Forefront TMG vary, and are .. more »

    http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Forefront-Management-Administrators-Administrators/dp/0735626383 HTH, Deb DEBRA LITTLEJOHN SHINDERMVP (Enterprise Security)“MS SECURITY”dshinder@isaserver.org. more..... more »

You’re going to hear a lot about DirectAccess on this blog and on the ISAserver.org web site over the next year. more..... more »

There’s a feature that ISA firewall administrators have been asking a long time for, and TMG finally answers that request in the form of outbound SSL inspection (outbound SSL bridging). The outbound SSL inspection feature enables the TMG firewall to break open the SSL connections established by your users behind the TMG firewall so that they ca.. more »

Some guys get all the fun! One of those guys is Jason Jones. Jason works with customers who need to support SecurID, so he gets a chance to test it against our favorite technologies – Forefront TMG and Forefront UAG. In his latest article on Jason’s Closer to the the Edge Blog, Jason shows you how to enable RSA SecurID on Forefront UAG. UAG is gain.. more »