Introduction

With each version of its corporate antivirus solution, Microsoft has tried to tighten integration with their other core infrastructure products. Whereas, the previous release of Forefront Endpoint Protection needed to be installed on top of an SCCM 2007 infrastructure, SCEP is built into SCCM 2012 right out of the box. Once you've migrated from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012, utilizing SCEP in your environment requires little more than agreeing to an End-user licence agreement (EULA) and making sure you've got the licenses to cover your client base.

What requires for a little foresight and planning is making sure that the right staff members have access to SCEP's management tools within SCCM and that your organization's SCCM distribution points have up-to-date SCEP definitions preloaded. Providing your distribution points with definitions ahead of a SCEP deployment will help prevent a situation, where all of your newly deployed SCEP clients attempt to reach out over the Internet to Microsoft Updates, and pull a larger initial definition and engine package at the same time and thereby, saturate your WAN links.

The recipes in this section will help to accomplish both of these tasks.