The survey results are in!
We recently conducted a survey on the FSS Blog asking your opinions of your current Exchange antimalware solution. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the survey and share some of the results. We greatly appreciate the time you took to provide your valuable feedback, and I can assure you that your opinions and suggestions will be taken seriously as we work on planning our next wave of products. We were also pleased to find that your responses showed that the new features in Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE) are working well for you.
We had a great turnout for our first FSS Blog Survey, receiving over 200 responses. Fifty six percent of responses came from customers of Forefront/Antigen products. Respondents were from a wide range of industries and company sizes. The most common role of survey respondents was “IT Administrator.”
What antimalware software do you use to protect your Exchange servers?
Answer Options |
Response Percent |
Antigen for Exchange |
6% |
Forefront Security for Exchange Server |
31% |
Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server |
19% |
Other |
44% |
Approximately how many end users with e-mail accounts does your organization have?
Answer Options |
Response Percent |
0-49 |
9.9% |
50-249 |
23.8% |
250-499 |
8.7% |
500-1,999 |
14.5% |
2,000-14,999 |
26.2% |
15,000-99,999 |
12.8% |
100,000 or more |
4.1% |
What is your role in your organization?
Answer Options |
Response Percent |
Consultant |
5.3% |
Architect |
7.6% |
Application Administrator (e.g. Exchange, SharePoint) |
26.9% |
IT Administrator |
46.8% |
CSO |
0.6% |
Other (please specify) |
12.9% |
We asked you to rate eight different aspects of your current antimalware solution on a scale of 1-4. As you can see from the results below, we did see higher scores for Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE) than its predecessor, Forefront Security for Exchange Server (FSE), in all eight categories.
|
FPE |
FSE |
Ease of installation |
3.38 |
3.14 |
Configuration and management |
2.92 |
2.28 |
Product training and documentation |
2.81 |
2.30 |
Data Leakage Protection features |
2.94 |
2.33 |
Security state reporting |
2.94 |
2.19 |
Antispam protection |
3.40 |
2.39 |
Performance impact of Antivirus scanning |
3.29 |
2.91 |
The overall value of the product (the solution provides a quality product for the price.) |
3.18 |
2.72 |
We did see that the product training and documentation score was lower than all other categories, and as a result will be working on improving this for both shipping products and as we design our next wave.
When asked how likely you were to use PowerShell scripting to manage FPE, the trend was clear. The larger the organization, the more likely you are to use PowerShell.
o 10% of small orgs (0-249 mail accounts)
o 25% of medium size orgs (250-1999 mail accounts)
o 43% of large orgs (2000+ mail accounts)
Almost 75% of Forefront/Antigen customers told us they use on-line documentation through the TechNet library more frequently than in-product help. Furthermore, most Forefront/Antigen customers told us they rely on internet searches to find information on Forefront products. We would like to improve on this in the next wave of products, perhaps by better integrating the online help and search experience into the product. If you have any feedback or suggestions on the issue, please feel free to post your comments to this article.
When asked what feature you would most like to see added to your current solution, one FPE customer replied, "a best practice analyzer." The good news is that Forefront already offers one. The FPE 2010 Best Practices Analyzer examines a local server running FPE 2010, and presents a list of warnings and errors for configurations that do not conform to recommended best practices.
On the topic of reporting, we asked how often you use the security reporting of your antimalware solution. While only 4% of FSE customers said you use security reports on a daily basis, this number increased to 24% for customers of FPE. This demonstrates the great improvements made in FPE reporting.
|
FPE |
FSE |
Almost never |
15% |
25% |
Occasionally |
47% |
40% |
Whenever something goes wrong |
15% |
31% |
Often. It is essential for my day to day use of FPE |
24% |
4% |
Once again, I would like to thank all of you who participated in this survey. We hope you will continue to participate in future surveys conducted on the blog. Your feedback truly does impact future product decisions, and we appreciate your input.
Andrew Schiano
Software Development Engineer in Test
Forefront Protection Suite