You might have noticed that I’m spending more time talking about IAG here on ISAserver.org. The reason for this is that there are things coming in the future that’s going to make it a lot easier for everyone to obtain and test the IAG SSL VPN gateway. While I can’t get into the details now, trust me that in the near future you’re going to find it a lot easier to get an IAG appliance and test it on your own network.

With the recent release of the Threat Management Gateway (TMG) Medium Business Edition (included in EBS), and the upcoming changes in availability of the IAG, the charter of ISAserver.org will evolve. This evolution will mirror the changes taking place at Microsoft, with the inclusion of the TMG firewall and the IAG SSL VPN gateway as part of the Forefront Edge collection of security products.

We’ve always been interested in covering the Microsoft edge security solution — ISA Server. Now that the ISA firewall brand is going away, we need to keep up with the times. The future of Microsoft edge security is TMG and IAG, and we’ll meet the challenge of keeping you up to date on both of those products.

With this in mind, I want to let you know more about the IAG and some of the features that I like the best. I think one of the best features of the IAG is the File Access interface. Using File Access, your users can connect to file servers on your internal network and connect to shares on those servers. You have fine tuned control over what servers users can connect to, and NTFS permissions are enforced on these connections. Best of all, the users are presented a Windows Explorer interface, so that they’re able to access file shares in the same way they access them when on the corpnet.

But like with any product, the IAG carries it own configuration issues that you need to be aware of before deploying it. This is especially true for the File Access feature, which has a number of prerequisites before you can get it to work.

Everything you need to know can be found somewhere in the IAG User Guide. The problem is that the IAG User Guide is a behemoth of a document, so finding what you need quickly can be a bit of a chore. What’s the solution? The IAG Product Team Blog!

The IAG Team has put together a great two part series on how to publish File Access using the IAG. This series lets you know is a quick and efficient manner what the prerequisites are and how to troubleshoot problems. You can find the two articles in the series at:

http://blogs.technet.com/edgeaccessblog/archive/20...2.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/edgeaccessblog/archive/20...2.aspx

HTH,

Tom

Thomas W Shinder, M.D., MCSE
Sr. Consultant / Technical Writer
Prowess Consulting www.prowessconsulting.com
PROWESS CONSULTING documentation | integration | virtualization
Email: tshinder@isaserver.org
MVP — Forefront Edge Security (ISA/TMG/IAG)