Interest for FEP has increased rather dramtically lately for us… which has been cool – as unlike its predessor – FCS, FEP is actually usable! 🙂

I think this is because of two reasons:

1) FEP will soon be part of the core CAL…. (August 2011) so there are many organisations that can now use FEP and not pay any more. This is obviously very compelling when org’s can immediately save hundreads of thousands, if not millions on their current anti-virus product, by swapping over to something they already own.

2) Logon times – this is the one that has impressed me. A number of clients, particularly schools, have older hardware on which they are deploying their Windows 7 SOE’s to. When using Mcaffee or Symantec on these machines – well, they’re not overly zippy. Moving from these solutions to FEP has resulted in massive improvements in boot and logon times. For example, one school – on particularly old hardware, went from a 1:47 boot up time to a 0:46 boot up time…. logon time went from 1:54 to 0:38 (and first logon went from 5:14 to 1:55)

The times above are ofcourse only indicitive of one location, with their specific hardware etc – but for those of you not running FEP – i would strongly suggest you have a look at it. Do some logon time comparisons for yourself, tell your boss that you can save them lots of cash and that the cash should be re-directed into your pay rise!

Oh and the backend management – its now OK…. still not great… but definately usable and keep in mind that FEP 2012 is also not far away…. where the management seems to be much better again (2012 is currently in beta 2 so it may get better – and hopefully not wosre!)