As part of its TechEd conference this week, Microsoft has announced that it has released a 2.0 beta version of its Microsoft BitLocker Administration (MBAM) tools. In a new post on the Microsoft Swingboard Series blog, Microsoft"s Stephen L. Rose talks about the new 2.0 beta features, including new support for Windows 8.
The 1.0 version of MBAM was released in the summer of 2011 and Microsoft has been taking feedback from its users since its launch. One change for the 2.0 version was to reduce the time that it takes to provision BitLocker to devices that uses Windows 8. Rose states:
On traditional storage disks, BitLocker and MBAM can perform Used Disk Space Only Encryption, which means that rather than encrypting the entire disk, just the portions of the disk that contain data on them will be encrypted. This can reduce the time that it takes to provision encryption to a new device by many times.
The new version also helps when IT administrators have to deal with a situation when a user loses a PIN. Rose says that MBAM 2.0 offers IT workers a kind of self-help system that should do most of the work for them without having to call Microsoft. He says:
Here at Microsoft, we experience thousands of calls per year for recovery assistance and when you combine the cost of the call, plus the cost of lost productivity, were talking about a very large expense. With MBAM 2.0, we can help customers eliminate most of that burden.
MBAM 2.0 also doesn"t permit users to put in easy-to-discover PINs such as 1111 as the new beta version now adds complex PIN support.
Source: Windows Springboard Series blog