FullArmor Equips Mobile Workers with Group Policy

Thomas Winckler, director of product management at FullArmor, has been demo'ing his company's new product, FullArmor Endpoint Policy Manager (EPM), all week at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in San Diego, and he told us that attendees have given him some good ideas about the product. More about that in a minute.

EPM pushes Active Directory and Group Policy settings to client computers that aren't attached to the domain. Its server component gathers the Resultant Set of Policies (RSoP) into a small package (200KB to 400KB) that can quickly be downloaded to client computers when they connect to the network from out in the field. Clients can be running either the EPM agent or the EPM browser helper object downloaded from the Web. EPM completes the RSoP download in a minimum of time (as few as 3 minutes) without waiting for VPN negotiation to take place, so even road warriors who make the briefest of stops at a Starbucks wireless hotspot can get the latest settings. Guest workers who need to attach to the network download the browser helper and RSoP package to temporarily comply with company policies, then at the end of their session, EPM removes the settings from their machines.

FullArmor designed EPM to meet the needs of its large enterprise customers, who were looking for a way to push Group Policy settings to client computers that seldom if ever connect to the domain. Customers also wanted a means of confirming that clients were truly getting and keeping the settings. EPM offers reporting capabilities that help these customers know and show that they're compliant with federal and other regulations.

Back to those ideas that Winckler got from MMS attendees—one was for a hybrid of the two EPM agents, a full agent that could be downloaded from the Web so that mobile employees could have it installed on their machines more easily. Maybe we'll see that capability in a future release.

For more information, go to http://www.fullarmor.com/products-fullarmor-endpoint-policy-manager.htm.