Migrating from Sophos to Forefront Endpoint Protection

One of the great things about deploying FEP 2010 is that it eases the pain of migrating away from your existing antimalware solution. According to the documentation it can detect and remove the following products

• Symantec Endpoint Protection version 11
  
• Symantec Corporate Edition version 10
  
• McAfee VirusScan Enterprise version 8.5 and version 8.7
  
• Trend Micro OfficeScan version 8.0 and version 10.0
  
• Forefront Client Security version 1 including the Operations Manager agent
  

But what if you use Sophos Endpoint Protection?

Sadly, if you're like me you'll have to work it out yourself. Sophos used to provide a script that could uninstall old versions of the client software, however I seem to recall it wasn't officially supported.

The problem with Sophos is that you have two components to remove- the update agent and the antimalware engine.

Both components are installed by MSI packages which are cached in the AutoUpdate folder. So, to perform the uninstall of Sophos you can create a cmd file in your FEP deployment folder with the following lines

msiexec /x "%programfiles%\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Cache\savxp\Sophos Anti-Virus.msi" /qn /quiet /norestart

msiexec /x "%programfiles%\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Cache\sau\Sophos AutoUpdate.msi" /qn /quiet /norestart

FEPInstall.exe /s /q

If you're planning an enterprise deployment you'll probably want to add more error checking in your script, but this should help you get started.

The cache folder can be useful if you still need to deploy Sophos as part of your transition. Create a new package that contains the sau folder from the Cache folder. Create a program with the following command line.

msiexec /i "sophos autoupdate.msi" BOOTSTRAP=NOUPDATE RMSACTION=0 REBOOT=ReallySuppress /qb

This will install the AutoUpdate agent on its own. Once installed, the agent will install the latest version of the antimalware agent from the Central Install Directory.

A final point that applies to both Sophos and Forefront endpoint protection - don't put your antimalware software in your image. Install it as a post-deployment step in your task sequence. This gives you the option to migrate between antimalware packages without the need to recreate your images.