With two customers telling me within just one week that they both have plans to replace their existing client security solutions with Microsoft Forefront Client Security I thought it’s about time to get a better understanding of the FCS product. After having visited the Microsoft Forefront Client Security product page I continued searching the web for additional information and stumbled upon the Forefront vs. the competition blog post on Microsoft-NOW.
I’ve been using Forefront Client Security for half a year now internally, and we’ve deployed it to several customers by now.
The internal deployment is with the management server, all the customer’s deployment are without (using custom ADMs to manage and configure the clients, and WSUS to handle the client updates).
To some extent, FCS is pretty dated by now. It works well though, does it’s job, and i haven’t found the speed hit to be bad. Managing FCS is much more straight-forward for a Windows admin than McAfee or Symantec, because it’s all Group Policy and MOM.
Forefront Endpoint Protection will be released later this year, and management software will now be based on SCCM. I’m not sure if this is a good thing for our customers, most of them are rather small (i can count the customers with more than a 100 PCs on one hand).