United States Change | All Microsoft Sites
Microsoft Home | Servers and Tools | Forefront | Server Security
Forefront Security for SharePoint beta 2 integrates with the Forefront "Stirling" Management Console to provide administrators with centralized security control for endpoints, messaging and collaboration servers, and the network edge. The integration with the Forefront "Stirling" console also helps reduce security risk by improving visibility into collaboration security with a dashboard, easy-to-use drill-down investigation features, and state assessment scans. These offer high level transparency of collaboration security throughout the enterprise, giving administrators the information they need to quickly respond to security incidents and organizational risk.
Forefront Security for SharePoint provides real-time antivirus, antispyware, and content scanning to ensure that documents are safe before they are stored and shared in SharePoint libraries. The Beta 2 release supports Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) as well as the next version of these products currently in beta.
Stop malware faster with multi-engine scanning
Forefront Security for Exchange Server is the only leading protection offering for SharePoint servers that combines multiple scanning engines in a single solution. Multiple engine scanning is important because even though virtually every business (97 percent) has antivirus and firewall protection, half of them (52 percent) experienced virus infections (CSI/FBI 2007 Survey). That’s because when new threats are discovered, the time it takes for scan engine vendors to release antivirus signatures to detect them varies greatly—in some cases by days or weeks.
Forefront Security for SharePoint multiple engine sets are proven to promote faster detection rates of new threats than single-engine solutions (AV-Test.org). Customers can choose engines from such industry-leading partners, each of which offers unique signature or heuristic detection technologies. Administrators can run up to five scan engines simultaneously and in different combinations across collaboration servers.
Block dangerous attachments
Forefront Security for SharePoint includes configurable file filtering rules that help administrators eliminate file types known for carrying viruses (for example, .exe) or opening organizations to legal exposure (for example, .mp3). It can identify threatening files even if the file extension has been changed. Forefront Security for SharePoint can also unpack and selectively repack compressed files, such as .zip, after removing out-of-policy documents.
Keep content safe
Keyword filtering in Forefront Security for SharePoint prevents the upload or download of out-of-policy content, from confidential files to documents with inappropriate language. Administrators can configure keyword filters to scan within most Office documents, as well as use pre-defined rules, to automatically block profane and discriminatory content.
Eliminate single points of failure
The diversity of antivirus engines protects against a single point of failure so that if one engine fails or goes offline to update, other engines continue to protect the IT environment without compromising performance and user document sharing.
Forefront Security for SharePoint integrates with Office SharePoint Server to enable high-performance protection of collaboration environments.
Maximize detection without compromising performance
Forefront Security for SharePoint enables administrators to balance the security and performance needs of their specific environments. These administrator settings manage the number of selected engines used at any one time, dynamically choosing the most up-to-date and effective engines for each scan.
Forefront Security for SharePoint maximizes performance through in-memory scanning, which is much more efficient than such traditional techniques as spooling to disk. It also uses multi-threaded scanning to increase throughput by enabling the software to analyze many document uploads or downloads simultaneously.
Protect rights-managed documents
Forefront Security for SharePoint integrates with Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services (RMS) to scan IRM-protected documents. It uses encryption and decryption on the fly to check these documents for malware and unwanted text while keeping security settings applied by RMS.
Optimize antivirus scanning on SharePoint servers
Using the latest Microsoft virus scanning API technologies, Forefront Security for SharePoint provides high-performance, highly stable real-time virus scanning of documents before they are saved to or retrieved from the SQL document library.
Forefront Security for SharePoint gives administrators a dashboard view of collaboration security, in-depth drill-down reports, and automated engine updating through its integration with the Forefront codename "Stirling" management console. This single console view saves administrators valuable time in configuring and maintaining the security of their collaboration environment, and enables them to quickly and accurately respond to issues.
Centralize management
Through the single console, Forefront Security for SharePoint centralizes configuration, deployment, and updating for all Forefront products across desktops, messaging servers, and collaboration servers. This enables administrators to easily manage their collaboration server security in the same place that they manage desktop antivirus or e-mail server settings.
View security dashboard and comprehensive reports
Forefront Security for SharePoint includes a dashboard view into the security state of the collaboration environment with snapshots of the top trends and issues. The dashboard offers embedded links to underlying data so administrators can quickly drill down to investigate a specific security incident or group of incidents. Forefront Security for SharePoint also enhances insight and control over malware threats through in-depth historical and trending reports.
Automate download and distribution of signature updates
Through its Rapid Update Process, Microsoft monitors all scan-engine vendor Web sites for updates. It downloads and validates new engine versions and signatures as they become available, and then posts them online for Forefront Security for SharePoint to download and install automatically. Once properly configured, no administrator involvement is needed to keep all engines and signatures current.
Extend manageability
The PowerShell interface in Forefront Security for SharePoint gives administrators the flexibility to create new scripts to manage and configure collaboration security.
Monitor collaboration security health
A management pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 enables administrators to monitor the health of Forefront Security for SharePoint as part of enterprise-wide management practices.
Features
Resources for IT Pros
