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New MS Forefront Tools Improve Security
Microsoft's new Forefront products and Vista security enhancements were highlighted at this week's Tech•Ed keynote
by Peter Varhol

Tech•Ed, June 2006

Much of what Microsoft cited during its Tech•Ed keynote on Sunday night is destined for delivery in the future. This includes Windows Vista, Longhorn Server, Office 2007, and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Many of these future capabilities have been known for some time, and many developers have already been planning for the new features of Vista and WPF. By doing so, the keynote presenters effectively laid out a roadmap of existing and upcoming technologies that work together to both deliver value to the enterprise and make the jobs of IT professionals a little easier.

The one new announcement was Forefront, the primary initiative in improving security and controlling access. Forefront is an umbrella technology for antivirus and anti-spyware tools for SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Server, and Windows client operating systems. The unique aspect of Forefront is that it coordinates the efforts of these different systems to watch for and prohibit actions that violate security policies or will harm an individual computer or the network.

There are also a number of security enhancements in the upcoming Windows Vista desktop operating system, including least privilege application execution, Bitlock disk encryption, and network access protections. These collectively might become the must-have features that will speed Vista adoption in the enterprise.

The keynote started on a somewhat incongruous note, with Windows Server Group Senior VP Bob Muglia focusing on the business value of IT and its role in the enterprise. Certainly Microsoft technology is in extensive use in the corporate enterprise, but it might not have been the best way to engage the audience, made up largely of IT professionals who are at Tech•Ed looking for ways to improve their skills and do their jobs better. Launching the keynote on an enterprise theme brought home the value that IT delivers, but the value to most of the attendees was "less PowerPoint presentations and more smokin' demos," a sentiment expressed by guest Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays computer maven Chloe O'Brian on the TV show "24."

In the keynote introduction, Muglia defined four promises that Microsoft was making with both enterprises and IT professionals. These promises nicely bridged the themes of enterprise value with professional expertise and improvement. These promises were:

1. Manage complexity and achieve agility.
2. Control access and improve security.
3. Advance business.
4. Amplify the impact of people.

Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie then set the stage with a 30-minute foray into hosted services that was perhaps the most thoughtful portion of the keynote. He used a trip through his own career to highlight the series of disruptions experienced by the computer industry over the last 30 years. The first began with Data General, which was building The Soul of a New Machine (with unfortunately no attribution to author Tracy Kidder). The DG 32-bit minicomputer (along with similar technology advances by neighbor Digital Equipment) was a disruptive force to the dominance of the expensive and difficult-to-maintain mainframe computer of that era.

The second disruption was signified by his move to Software Arts, which was the developer of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet application. The next was to Lotus, where Ozzie was involved in the development of Symphony, the little-known next-generation spreadsheet.

The next, and probably the best-known, disruption was timed with his founding of Iris Associates, a Lotus-funded startup that focused on enterprise collaboration. The resulting product, Lotus Notes, radically changed how knowledge workers collaborated in the enterprise before the widespread availability of the Internet. The last part of Ozzie's journey was the founding of Groove Networks (and its subsequent acquisition by Microsoft last year), which developed a product to enable peer-to-peer sharing and collaboration within the enterprise.