Nirmal's Blog

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit New release V5.5

Microsoft recently released the next version of MAP Toolkit and it has following new features

• Windows Azure Platform assessment for easier migration the cloud
• Heterogeneous database discovery for accelerated migration to SQL Server
• Microsoft Internet Explorer migration assessment for migration to Windows 7 compatible versions
• Enhanced server consolidation capabilities help save time and effort when creating virtualization assessments and proposals

If you have not heard about MAP Toolkit before, it has also following assessment capabilities apart from what is mentioned above

• Migration to Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Office 2010
• Migration to Windows 7 compatible versions of Internet Explorer
• Migration to cloud-based services
• Server virtualization with Hyper-V
• SQL Server consolidation and migration to SQL Server 2008 R2
• Assessment of current software usage and client access history for simplified software asset management
• PC security assessment and migration to Microsoft Forefront Client Security

For more information please visit

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx

Download Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=158988

Download Software Usage tracker Guide for MAP

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=195445

Training kit for MAP

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=196614

source – Microsoft Technet – Solution Accelerators

Installing Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010

After researching about Endpoint Protection, I thought of downloading and evaluating the product. first of all, size of the ISO is only 76MB and that didn’t take a long time for me to download it

after downloading, I managed to mount it using my image mounting tool and since I’m not having SCCM in my environment I navigated to “Client” folder and run “FEPInstall.exe”

I select Next option to proceed with the installation wizard which gave me a brief introduction about Forefront Endpoint Protection.

Next I need to accept Software License Terms

Next, I decided that I wont be participating for the customer experience improvement program and proceed with the installation

after above step, I was provided with an option to select, whether I want to enable my firewall(which is recommended), but I decided that I will leave my firewall in it’s current state and proceed

next we will proceed and install the product

below you will see a screen capture of the installation progress

after awhile you will notice that the installation has completed successfully

first time when you run the application, it will say that the computer is at risk, that is because we don’t have current definitions.First thing which I did was to up date endpoint protection with latest definitions

after completing definition update it’s possible for us to see information relating to definitions version and the date.Also you will notice that the color theme has now changed to GREEN from RED

as the application is now up to date I thought of initiating a scan

after completing the scan we can see statistics

next, I thought of using an infected pen drive to evaluate my detection capabilities. as soon as the pen drive was plugged in to the system, I was given a notification to take an action against a potential threat. looking at the alert level which is “Severe” I decided to go ahead and remove it.

after applying actions which I selected, cleaning process began

after few seconds, Endpoint Protection was successful in removing a severe infection

this is now visible in the history tab

this is a quick overview on installation of Endpoint Security and basic set of features and capabilities of the product.