Thanks gentlemen: We are mostly interested in the hosted spam solution since it does have a quarantine area and would keep the traffic from hitting our network. We were also looking at on-premise Barracudas, Ironport, ProofPoint and Symantec all of which are somewhat expensive so if we can get the Hosted Forefront for free...well give you one guess where we are leaning :-)
Of course free doesn't always mean good, so I appreciate the information. Pete Pfefferkorn University of Cincinnati Email Services-Systems Engineer pete.pfefferk...@uc.edu (513)556-9076 -----Original Message----- From: Joe Pochedley [mailto:joe.poched...@fivesgroup.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 12:12 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Microsoft Forefront...anyone using..opinions Pete, We've been using the hosted Forefront for Exchange for the past 18 months or so... Prior to that we were using a locally hosted Barracuda box for spam & AV filtering... We switched to Forefront for basically the same reasons (changing our EA brought it along basically for free). So far the service has been good. Detection accuracy is good. Haven't had any problems with service availability... Latency caused by messages traversing through the detection centers seems to take < 5 seconds every time I've looked. Customer service / support has been good, though I've never had to use it for anything major (just a couple questions on setting up the Directory Sync tool). There are a few false positives here and there, mostly newsletter type things that have ads in them.. Occasionally a message from one of our Asia-Pac customers or distributors will get flagged as spam. At this point I haven't incorporated the Safelist Aggregation (whitelist) for Exchange 2007, but that's actually on my to-do list for this afternoon. My only real complaint is that the administrative reporting and message tracking aren't all that great. The level of detail is sufficient for business types, but of course I'm not a business type. :) Oh, and if you ever want to know exactly why a specific message was blocked (say to troubleshoot a false positive), the support team will tell you that the detection criteria is proprietary info and won't give you details. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ping me. Joe Pochedley -----Original Message----- From: Pfefferkorn, Pete (pfeffepe) [mailto:pfeff...@ucmail.uc.edu] Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 8:32 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Cc: Pfefferkorn, Pete (pfeffepe) Subject: Microsoft Forefront...anyone using..opinions I apologize if this came through a second time but didn't see it get posted. I have a off topic subject. We have the opportunity to possibly adjust our license agreement with Microsoft that will entitle us to Forefront both hosted and on Premise solution for next to nothing. We went through the hosted presentation, and it looks similar to other hosted solutions like Proofpoint and Postini but considerable less expensive. They have an quarantine area, 5 engines etc and the cost is next to nothing. We could also install ForeFront on out backend servers and hub servers and replace our existing TrendMicro software which would have an additional cost savings. I'm looking for feedback on anyone who is using the Forefront product line and their opinions of it as a hosted solution and on-premise deployment. We are native Exchange 2007 and do not use edge servers but from what I see none of this would require any changes to our current infrastructure for onsite and hosted solution. Pete Pfefferkorn University of Cincinnati Email Services-Systems Engineer pete.pfefferk...@uc.edu (513)556-9076 ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
