New Management Packs for Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server and SharePoint are available
My name is Danny Popper, and I’m a program manager with the Forefront Protection team.
One of the most invaluable tools for an administrator responsible for running server software is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Operations Manager is a tool that, when configured with management packs, can centrally monitor your server software and let you know as soon as a problem occurs, instead of making you keep track of each application and server separately. Especially for products, like FPE and FPSP, which are frequently installed on a large number of servers, Operations Manager can make your day much less hectic. (For the full scoop on Operations Manager, head over here for their spiel.)
When FPE shipped in November 2009, we released a management pack. We’ve heard the clamor for a similar management pack for FPSP, but we decided to wait a few weeks in order to give you all the good news at once:
· We have released a refreshed FPE management pack.
· We have released a brand new FPSP management pack.
· Both packs are available in all 11 languages in which FPE/FPSP is available. (That is: Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian, and Spanish.)
Besides cleaning up our health rollup and monitors and releasing language packs, our other investment for these releases was in our user guides. They are included in the links above, as well as being available in the Microsoft TechNet library (FPE and FPSP). The content has been updated and restructured for ease of use. The online user guides can tell you about how to import the management pack as well as how to enable performance threshold rules and work with management pack operations. If you want additional information about Operations Manager 2007, go to the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager TechNet library.
In addition to enhancing the management pack documentation for FPE and FPSP, we recently made additional updates to our FPE documentation in the TechNet Library. There is now a Best practices topic for FPE operations and we made many small scale changes throughout the FPE doc set, mostly as a result of CSS and customer feedback. For example, the “Important Notes” section in the FPE Release Notes was reorganized by feature so that they are easier to follow. Additional documentation updates to FPE and FPSP are scheduled for later this summer. You can access the FPE doc set, including the Operations Manager 2007 content, via the following URL: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=111583.)
One last caveat that is important to mention, though, regarding the management pack refresh for FPE, is that you will have to uninstall any previous management pack (11.0.xxx.x) before installing this one. We understand that this is not always a simple task, and that many of you have customized the management pack, but we felt that it was a necessary step in order to clean up the health rollup included in the management pack.
Enjoy the management packs!
Danny Popper
Program Manager – Forefront Server Protection