There’s no doubt that SharePoint is the hottest product on Microsoft’s shelves these days. For those of you who don’t know about SharePoint, SharePoint is a document collaboration and sharing solution that allows users within and outside your organization to share documents and other types of information in document libraries. Users can share this information, take advantage of strong versioning controls, and even apply sophisticated Rights Management within and outside the company by taking advantage of Windows Server 2008 Federated Rights Management.
However, SharePoint often can become a security issue, because the antimalware software that you install on your typical file server isn’t able to access the files contained in a SharePoint database. There is also the risk that users will store files, such as MP3s and video files, that can put your company at risk for copyright violations. In addition, users might store information on the SharePoint site that is too sensitive to be exposed to a publicly accessible site. What you need is a way to perform content inspection, file inspection and antimalware controls on your SharePoint sites.
The best answer I’ve found for these problem is Forefront Security for SharePoint. Forefront is a umbrella name for Microsoft’s major security products. If you haven’t run into the Forefront branding before, the following products fall under the Forefront name:
- Forefront Client Security
- Forefront Security for Exchange
- Forefront Security for SharePoint
- Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 (IAG)
- Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 (ISA)
I’m sure there will be more Forefront applications in the future, and that some of them currently in the Forefront brand will be changing their names.
Forefront Security for SharePoint manages and integrates multiple antivirus engines to provide protection against the latest threats, helping ensure documents are safe before they are saved to or retrieved from the SharePoint document library. SharePoint can also perform content inspection by scanning for sensitive information, profanity or other admin defined content inspection policies. Forefront Security for SharePoint also enables you to easily manage configuration and operation, automated antivirus signature updates and reporting at the server and enterprise level.
Those of you who purchase Forefront Security for SharePoint to protect Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 will also be licensed to use Antigen for SharePoint to protect Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 environments. This allows you to bring in Forefront Security for SharePoint while you’re in the process of upgrading from previous versions of SharePoint.
For more information about Forefront Security for SharePoint and a downloadable trial version, check out
http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/sharepoint/en/us/default.aspx
HTH,
Tom
Thomas W Shinder, M.D.
Site: http://www.isaserver.org/
Blog: http://blogs.isaserver.org/shinder/
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MVP – Microsoft Firewalls (ISA)