Forefront Protection Server Management Console

 

Microsoft Forefront Protection Server Management Console

The Microsoft Forefront Protection Server Management Console (FPSMC) is a management tool that provides information technology (IT) administrators with a way to centrally manage Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint® deployments within your enterprise. Using a browser-based user interface, the management console provides centralized management.

Centralized deployment allows administrators to deploy various files and settings to all or selected servers in the enterprise. Using the FPSMC, you can deploy the following to remote servers:

  • Policies for configuration management

  • Forefront Protection product activation keys

  • Scan engine signature file updates (to centralize the update procedure)

  • Jobs that send reports on a fixed schedule

Note

FPSMC does not support product and patch deployments for FPE and FPSP.

In addition, you can retrieve the following from remote servers:

  • Quarantined data.

  • Centralized reporting allows administrators to more closely monitor the servers in the enterprise and evaluate the effectiveness of antivirus software. The FPSMC collects statistics from all of its managed servers and stores them in a central repository for later analysis. Reports provide information about the trends in virus, filter, and update activity for each individual server or the entire enterprise.

Data retrieved by FPSMC will be stored in a SQL Server database. It can be stored in SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, which is a version of SQL Server with limited features. Alternately, data can also be stored on an existing instance of Enterprise SQL Server 2008—locally or remotely—using SQL Server Authentication or Windows Authentication.

Managing Servers with FPSMC

The FPSMC supports the management of the following products:

  • Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server

  • Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint

Note

You cannot use FPSMC to manage Forefront Security Server or earlier products. To centrally manage Forefront Security Server or earlier products, see Microsoft Forefront Server Security Management Console (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=160333).

FPSMC can be used to manage Forefront Protection Server products across trusted domains. FPSMC can manage servers in the perimeter network (also known as the demilitarized zone, DMZ, and screened subnet).

When managing servers that are not in the same domain as the console, you must enter server names and user accounts as fully qualified domain names (fqdn) for them to be resolved. The Domain browser field in the Add Servers pane and the Browse button in the Add Users pane will only browse in the installed domain and its subdomains.