Q1: What is Microsoft Forefront?

The Microsoft Forefront comprehensive line of business security products provides greater protection and control through integration with your existing IT infrastructure and through simplified deployment, management, and analysis. Microsoft Forefront helps you confidently meet ever-changing threats and increased business demands with highly responsive information protection and access control solutions supported by Microsoft technical guidance.

Q2: What products are currently in the Forefront brand family?

The Forefront product line currently consists of the following products:

Management
1) Forefront Identity Manager

2) Forefront Protection Manager

3) Forefront Server Security Management Console

Protection and Access
1) Forefront Client Security

2) Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server

3) Forefront Online Protection for Exchange

4) Forefront Security for SharePoint

5) Forefront Security for Office Communication Server

6) Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010

7) Intelligent Application Gateway

Related platform technologies
1) Windows Identity Foundation

2) Active Directory Technologies

Q3: How is Microsoft Forefront different from other security solutions from Microsoft?

Microsoft Forefront is a comprehensive product line of security products for business customers, and is designed to be centrally managed and integrated into IT infrastructure products, such as Active Directory, and is intended to scale to many thousands of users. As such, Microsoft Forefront security products are distinct from Microsoft consumer-oriented security products, such as Windows Live OneCare, Windows Defender, and the firewalls built into Windows XP and Windows Vista, which are designed to secure stand-alone PCs.

Q4: What are the main benefits customers can anticipate with Forefront?

First and foremost, Forefront provides business customers with highly effective security for Microsoft operating systems, applications, and servers. Beyond that, however, Forefront products are designed to work with your Microsoft infrastructure, such as Active Directory (AD), Group Policies, or Windows Update Services. This means that you can manage security service deployment, distribution, configuration, and enforcement across your organization seamlessly.

Security management and reporting becomes more centralized in Forefront; its products integrate with System Center solutions and Windows Server Update Services. More centralized collection and analysis of security management information is possible because all security event information is stored in a single SQL Server repository from which events can be identified and interpreted. The common infrastructure obviates the need to deploy unnecessarily redundant infrastructure, speeding deployment and reducing costs. And of course, this minimizes the need for expensive training and retraining of administrative staff in a variety of unrelated management and reporting consoles.

Q5: Why should customers choose Forefront security products over competing solutions?

The industry has concentrated its efforts on adding more and more features to existing products or creating new security products, thus multiplying the number and complexity of point solutions. Despite this, business security issues continue to grow, due in large part to the significant operational challenges:

1) Integrating those security products so they work well together and leverage each other

2) Integrating them into pre-existing IT infrastructure

3) Managing and deploying security simply, pervasively, and without mistakes

4) Managing security as a single solution instead of a bunch of disparate products

Forefront provides a comprehensive family of highly effective security products, but this is only the first step. By concentrating our efforts on the integration and management aspects of security, Forefront products can help prevent misconfiguration, enable organizations to deploy security products more pervasively, and give businesses a unified view into the security state of their networks. In fact, addressing these operational issues makes the network more secure—the configurations are correct, security is deployed where it is needed, and management and reporting are simplified.

Q6: What support does Forefront offer for heterogeneous environments?

While Microsoft believes that its security products provide the best security for Microsoft operating systems, applications, and servers, it recognizes that many customers have non-Microsoft products in their network; some may be security devices, while others may be applications or servers they wish to protect. Microsoft has an extensive partner ecosystem whose members develop numerous products to protect other operating systems, as well as applications like Oracle and SAP.

In keeping with our belief that the major customer challenges are in the areas of integration and management, Microsoft is driving our partners to integrate with Microsoft-based infrastructure products, such as Active Directory, System Center Operations Manager, and System Center Configuration Manager, as well as Internet standards, such as WS-Management, that will enable system administrators to simply and efficiently manage their network security whether the solution is an all-Microsoft solution or a heterogeneous solution..

Q7: Why did Microsoft brand the security products as Forefront?

The products under the Forefront brand all share a common vision for how to best secure a business’s IT infrastructure. This new brand underlines the Microsoft commitment to the security space and the intent to continually expand an enterprise-grade security product line. In addition, the Forefront brand helps distinguish Microsoft business security products from our more consumer-oriented products, such as Windows Live OneCare and Windows Defender.

Q8: Why aren’t all the Forefront security products branded as Forefront?

Each product under the Forefront brand will undergo a name change consistent with Forefront brand guidelines when the next major version of that product is released. During this transition period, some names may or may not include "Forefront," but all the products embody the values and vision of the brand.

Q9: How will customers be able to purchase Forefront?

Forefront products will be available as stand-alone solutions or as part of the Enterprise CAL suite, the Exchange Enterprise CAL suite, or an integrated security product suite. Customers who buy stand-alone solutions today will be able to easily upgrade to these broader Microsoft licensing vehicles.

SQL Server 2008 R2 delivers several breakthrough capabilities that will enable your organization to scale database operations with confidence, improve IT and developer efficiency, and enable highly scalable and well managed Business Intelligence on a self-service basis for your users.

Q2: Tell me about the new SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Center Edition?

Built on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter is designed to deliver a high-performing data platform that provides the highest levels of scalability for large application workloads, virtualization and consolidation, and management for an organization’s database infrastructure. Datacenter helps enable organizations to cost effectively scale their mission-critical environment. Key features new to Datacenter:

1) Application and Multi-Server Management for enrolling, gaining insights and managing over 25 instances

2) Highest virtualization support for maximum ROI on consolidation and virtualization

3) High-scale complex event processing with SQL Server StreamInsight

4) Supports more than 8 processors and up to 256 logical processors for highest levels of scale

5) Supports memory limits up to OS maximum

Q3: Tell me about the new SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse Edition?

SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse is a highly scalable data warehouse appliance-based solution. Parallel Data Warehouse delivers performance at low cost through a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and compatibility with hardware partners – scale your data warehouse to tens and hundreds of terabytes. Key features new to Parallel Data Warehouse:

1)10s to 100s TBs enabled by MPP architecture

2) Advanced data warehousing capabilities like Star Join Queries and Change Data Capture

3) Integration with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS

4) Supports industry standard data warehousing hub and spoke architecture and parallel database copy

Q4: What investments were made in SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition?

SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise delivers a comprehensive data platform that provides built-in security, availability, and scale coupled with robust business intelligence offerings—helping enable the highest service levels for mission-critical workloads. The following capabilities are new to Enterprise:

1) PowerPivot for SharePoint to support the hosting and management of PowerPivot applications in SharePoint

2) Application and Multi-Server Management for enrolling, gaining insights and managing up to 25 instances

3) Master Data Services for data consistency across heterogeneous systems

4) Data Compression now enabled with UCS-2 Unicode support

Q5: What investments were made in SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition?

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard delivers a complete data management and business intelligence platform for departments and small organizations to run their applications—helping enable effective database management with minimal IT resources. The following capabilities are new to Standard:

1) Backup Compression to reduce data backups by up to 60% and help reduce time spent on backups

2) Can be managed instance for Application and Multi-Server Management capabilities

Q6: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition capitalize on hardware innovation?

SQL Server 2008 R2 helps you take advantage of the latest hardware technology advancements and enables high scalability building on top of industry-standard hardware for great total cost of ownership. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 working in concert enable customers to scale up to 256 logical processors.

In addition, Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 takes greater advantage of the processing power of new multi-core systems. This means support for more virtual systems per physical host, leading to potential cost reductions while increasing the scalability and flexibility of virtual infrastructure. New Hyper-V Live Migration allows organizations to move a virtual machine between two host servers without any interruption of service. All this helps organizations continue to get the best value out of their hardware and take better advantage of consolidation opportunities.

Q7: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 help gain rapid insight from high-speed data?

Gain rapid insight from streaming information using SQL Server StreamInsight. StreamInsight lowers the cost to extract, analyze, and correlate streaming data, enabling companies to find opportunities and exceptions in real time.

A highly optimized engine built on a lightweight streaming architecture allows queries to be rapidly executed on high-speed data with low latency. Developers can write StreamInsight applications using .NET in their language of choice. With a large community of developers working with familiar tools, businesses can maximize the time to value of StreamInsight solutions and reduce the time and cost required to create them.

Flexible deployment scenarios and a central management interface help IT deploy and manage StreamInsight solutions efficiently while accurately tracking resource usage.

Q8: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 ensure uptime and security?

Provide consistent and predictable responsiveness to end users using SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor. Resource Governor enables organizations to manage their SQL Server workloads and system resource consumption by specifying CPU and memory limits for different applications, ensuring that concurrent workloads provide consistent performance to end users.

Protect your valuable information with flexible, transparent data encryption for databases, data files, and logs files. SQL Server 2008 data encryption helps organizations secure data from unauthorized users without having to change the underlying application.

Facilitate compliance and provide an audit trail that enables you to answer questions like “who accessed our data” with SQL Server Audit.

Q9: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 Manage Efficiently at Scale?

Investments in application and multi-server management will help organizations proactively manage database environments efficiently at scale through centralized visibility into resource utilization and help streamline consolidation and upgrade initiatives across the application lifecycle—all with tools that make it fast and easy.

Increase visibility and control
Gain quick insights into SQL server instances and applications with tools like new wizards that help enable fast and easy multi-server management setup and reveal versioning information for more control over server sprawl, no professional services required.

Optimize resources
Quickly identify consolidation opportunities with dashboard viewpoints, data and log file utilization rollups, and utilization trends through adjustable capacity policies helping eliminate underutilized servers.

Improve efficiencies
Accelerate deployments and upgrades through a new concept, a single unit of deployment, that packages database schema (database, tables, stored procedures, etc) with deployment requirements and can be extracted from existing applications or created in Microsoft Visual Studio, helping reduce deployment trial and error.

Q10: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 Enable Self-Service Analysis and Easier Collaboration?

Broaden the reach of business intelligence tools to a larger audience and foster ad-hoc analysis by empowering users to create their own analytic applications through the PowerPivot add in to Excel (formerly known as "Gemini") and SQL Server 2008 R2. With PowerPivot, users are empowered to create solutions using data from both IT-managed and external sources, carry out rich ad-hoc analysis and modeling, extract value from data more easily, and publish and share reports for their colleagues to view.

Reduce the time and cost of reporting with intuitive end-user tools that make it easier for people to find, use, and share information. Report Builder 3.0 in SQL Server 2008 R2 makes it even easier for end-users to create reports faster, and fosters collaboration and consistency by making them easier to share.

Enable self-service analysis while maintaining IT guidelines and control by providing IT-supported platforms like SharePoint to publish their solutions while ensuring accessibility and IT governance.