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After doing several installations of Server 2012 on Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 servers I became convinced that I should migrate the entire internal serverpark to 2012. I ran into several issues (which I will post later on) but most annoyingly of all is ForeFront 2010 on the servers.

Note: Microsoftsoft has, since creation of this post and contact with them, made several updates to ForeFront which will allow it to function on Windows 8 and Server 2012.

If you are planning on doing an upgrade from 2008 (R2) to 2012 uninstall ForeFront 2010 beforehand. If like me however you may have not known this would become an issue I will explain why. ForeFront’s installer does not allow you to install it on Server 2012 because it sortoff is already included. However this mean you can no longer uninstall it via the Control Panel once it’s already installed via the Upgrade path because of the same annoying error.

I have already found that one can remove the Management software by using the MSIExec /X command. Searching for “ForeFront” in the registry will yield the MSIExec /I version of this command rather quickly. But ForeFront itself wants to unstall using the following command:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\Setup.exe /x

Which yields the “Your version of the Windows operating system is not supported by this program” error and stop your from uninstalling ForeFront.

You can ofcourse simply Disable the service running ForeFront. As of now I have done this and am still in the process of figuring out how to uninstall ForeFront from the PC.

Microsoft has issued the following updates to support ForeFront Endpoint Protection 2010 on both Windows 8 and Server 2012. Installing these updates allows you to remove the programs.

Update Rollup 1 for Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2551095

Update adds Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 support to Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 clients

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2758685/en-us