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It's been standardized on something that doesn't intuitively make sense to me - two tags for the same product, vendor prefixing, and an unused acronym:

threat-management-gateway -> ms-ftmg

tmg-2010 -> ms-ftmg-2010

forefront-2010 -> ms-forefront-2010

(that last one seems like it's a non-change, unless every product requires a vendor prefix now.) To me, all these tags should just be synonyms for TMG-2010.

It might be confirmation bias, but nobody I know calls it ms-ftmg-anything, it's just TMG (worst-case MS-TMG, like ISA was and is just ISA or MS-ISA), or they just call it Forefront. Like people that call WinWord "Microsoft".

So in short, I think we've gone the wrong way here, and if those tags above are going to consolidate, they should all consolidate to the same thing anyway.

2 Answers 2

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As a reasonably frequent poster of TMG questions, I totally concur that it should just be

Nobody ever calls it FTMG, they just drop the "forefront" as it's not part of the product name, but rather the product line.

However, before I change the synonyms around, I'll give the public a while to voice their opinions :)

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The "standard" is Vendor-Product-Version. Products which are so well known that anyone can name the company which produces it should have the company name left off. I would disagree with any assertion that everyone intrinsically knows that "TMG" is "Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway".

The "F" in "FTMG" was added because that's how Microsoft officially abbreviates the product name. I don't mind it without, but looked up the official guidance when carefully considering the retag/consolidation.

Your suggested tags have been synonymed to the canonical tags, so if anyone tries to use them, they'll be auto-corrected. You can call it TMG-2010 all you want, the system will still know what you're talking about.

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  • a) the synonymed tags should all route to the same product. They're currently just mildly renamed versions of each other. b) everyone that uses TMG calls it TMG, including the product group (see the ISA team blog). The second part doesn't matter as much as the suboptimal routing to different-yet-synonymous-but-not-synonymed end tags.
    – TristanK
    Sep 7, 2011 at 21:24
  • re: a) There'll eventually be other versions of TMG, so TMG-2010 shouldn't be a synonym for TMG. There's only 3 tags, one for general TMG, one for TMG 2010, and one for Forefront (ie Antigen) products. b) Microsoft's website is littered with various acronyms. I agree that FTMG sounds weird, I didn't make it up. Your last sentence doesn't make sense. Could you restate it, or perhaps clearly & explicitly outline how you think the tags should be laid out?
    – Chris S
    Sep 7, 2011 at 22:25
  • See the titles at: social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/Forefrontedgegeneral/… for a quick overview of what people that use the product post about it as. I'm suggesting that for ease of use, better SEO, and simple populist rationalism, that SF adopt the most common acronym for the major tag. On other versions - an announcement is being awaited on the future of TMG, so perhaps not. On people calling anything forefront 2010 including antigen - it's an ambiguous tag, and should arguably just be removed (unless there's a gentle way of coaching people not to use an umbrella brand)
    – TristanK
    Sep 8, 2011 at 0:15
  • I agree that it's far from obvious what TMG stands for (I thought it was a variant of TMNT). I'm sure those who do know what TMG is also already know who the vendor is. However, for those of us who don't know, does it really make any difference who the vendor is?
    – John Gardeniers
    Sep 8, 2011 at 2:02

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