News

Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010 SP1 Released

• By Kurt Mackie
• December 14, 2010

Microsoft last week released the first service pack for its 2010 Forefront messaging and collaboration management product.

Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010 Service Pack 1 is now available for download. It's the finished product that follows the release candidate, which had an October debut. Forefront UAG 2010 is the successor product to Microsoft's Intelligent Access Gateway 2007 solution.

While UAG 2010 is part of the Forefront product line of enterprise security products, it mostly provides access control and management support for applications on remote devices that access an organization's network, rather than security. Microsoft has another product, called Forefront Threat Management Gateway, to provide security for Web-delivered threats.

UAG 2010 works with Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard or Enterprise editions and brings together technologies such as secure socket layer VPNs, Windows features such as Remote Desktop and DirectAccess, plus Web publishing. It can also leverage the DirectAccess feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that lets remote clients connect to a network without having to use a virtual private network, although a DirectAccess Server is required at the network edge to enable that capability, according to a Microsoft FAQ.

It's now easier to work with DirectAccess with this SP1 release, according to a Microsoft blog. One-time password support was added. Creating and distributing Group Policy objects has been facilitated. The solution now has Network Access Protection "for simplified endpoint policy enforcement," according to the blog.

A more nuanced view of the new DirectAccess capabilities enabled by this SP1 is described in Microsoft's TechNet library article here.

In addition, UAG 2010 works with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 to enable claims-based authentication and authorization, plus single sign-in to legacy applications. UAG 2010 also lets IT pros access the information rights management settings in SharePoint and Exchange that were configured using Active Directory Rights Management Services. Users have to first publish their Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory Rights Management Servers to enable that capability, according to a TechNet article on Forefront UAG SP1.

A free 120-day trial version of UAG 2010 SP1 can be downloaded at the TechNet Evaluation Center here. The 64-bit product requires a "clean Windows Server 2008 R2 installation, with no other applications installed on it" to run, according to Microsoft's system requirements.