Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) Help Sets a New Bar

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the Beta 1 version of the new Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG), then make a note for yourself to take some time and test it out in your lab. The Forefront TMG is the next version of the ISA Firewall, and the TMG should be released some time next year if everything goes OK during the development.

While the Beta 1 version is far from feature complete (at least we all hope so), one thing that I’ve been very impressed by is the new Help File for the TMG. While the previous versions of the Help file included with the three versions of the ISA Firewall were pretty good, the Help file contents included with the Beta 1 version of the TMG set a new bar for high quality Help content.

It’s clear that the folks who put the Help content together for the TMG have been working hard for quite some time. The new Help file content isn’t just a rehash of the old Help file content. Instead, the content has been significantly enhanced so that features that were ambiguous or hard to understand are now more thoroughly explained. The chance of running into a configuration option that you have idea what it does is significantly decreased due to the new, enhanced Help file content.

But, no matter how good things are, they can always be made better. This is where you come in! When going over the Forefront TMG Help content, if there is anything you don’t understand or doesn’t make sense, click the Send Feedback link and let them know. One problem with this is that you don’t typically have an email client configured on the firewall, and in fact, it’s TMG firewall best practice to NOT have a email client configured, so that you don’t download malware to the firewall.

One solution to this problem is to install the Windows Desktop Experience on the Windows Server 2008 computer and use the email client associated with that, and then configure the mail client with a real SMTP server, but with a bogus POP3 server, so that you don’t use the mail client to download malware to the firewall.

If you don’t want to deal with the mail client at all, you can just copy and paste the content and send it to [email protected] The docs team really does want to hear from you and they read and consider everything you send to them. So let them know!

Also, write to them not only about things in the existing content that you don’t understand, but let me know if there are additional topics that need to be covered.

HTH,

Tom

Thomas W Shinder, M.D.
Site: http://www.isaserver.org/

Blog: http://blogs.isaserver.org/shinder/
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Email: [email protected]
MVP — Microsoft Firewalls (ISA)

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