As you can imagine, the tech talk in our home gets pretty interesting at times. For years the talk centered around ISA and then TMG firewalls. Of course we still love our ISA and TMG firewalls, but from listening to Tom talk, it sounds like the Forefront Unified Access Gateway has a bright future. Since I like bright and shiny things as much as the next gal, I figured I should get to speed on UAG.
While I don’t consider myself a UAG expert (yet), I can say that it’s clear from what I’ve studied and from what Tom says, is that DirectAccess is the UAG deployment scenario that will make the most difference in any organization. DirectAccess (DA) is something that can revolutionize the way your company does remote access computing – and make your employees more productive, from anywhere.
How do I know? First, I see Tom using it everyday when he remains connected to the Microsoft corporate network all day using DirectAccess – then I listened to him rave about DirectAccess during his recent trip to the MVP conference. He said DA connected him to the MS corpnet when he was at DFW, then when he was at SEA, and then when he was at the hotel. When he got on the MS campus, he connected to the MS wireless network and DA turned itself off. What did he have to do to make this happen?
NOTHING. It just worked.
But that’s Tom and Microsoft. I only believe things that I can make work. So I took the information from the UAG DA Deployment Guide and with a little advice from Tom, setup DA on my own office network. It works! Now when I leave to go to a meeting, attend a conference, or travel out of town to see relatives and friends, I’m always connected to my office – with access to the Terabytes of personal and profession information I’ve gathered over the last twenty years at my fingertips, without having to do anything other than turn on the computer and log on.
This got me to thinking about writing an article about DirectAccess for TechRepublic. The article is titled 10 Things You Should Know About DirectAccess. That article covers DA in general. I also did another one called 10 things you should know about UAG and DA, which should be published in a week or two. I figured I should share some interesting things you should know about DA in general before telling you about the wonderful things that UAG DA does (I deployed UAG DA in my office).
Check out the article at:
http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=1582705
HTH,
Deb
DEBRA LITTLEJOHN SHINDER
MVP (Enterprise Security)
“MS SECURITY”
[email protected]