Hi All,

Does anyone know whether MBAM 2.0 agents will continue to work with MBAM 2.5 infrastructure?

We are in the process of planning an upgrade to 2.5 for the infrastructure but I cannot find anything that states whether there is an absolute requirement to, best practice to or no need to upgrade the client agents at the same time.

We would plan to upgrade them eventually, but via device rebuild/refresh rather than a mass deployment if possible.

Our existing agents are running on Windows 7 and the infrastructure upgrade is to allow for support of Windows 8.1 so the key question is whether we need to refresh all of the agents on the Windows 7 devices or can leave them as they are for now.

Many Thanks in advance

Hello,

Yes MBAM 2.0 agents could communicate with MBAM 2.5 servers.

You must ugrade the agents only when your servers are up to date with MBAM 2.5

Regards,

Thanks Lionel,

The question is really though whether we MUST upgrade the agents to 2.5 on Windows 7 machines or whether they can stay at 2.0 agents and continue to work and be supported by Microsoft?

The reason is that we are doing the upgrade so we can support a small number (100 or so) of Windows 8.1 machines and we don't want to upgrade the agents on the Windows 7 estate (10K+ devices) unless we have to.

So from your answer it sounds like the agents would work, but not clear whether we could leave the 2.0 agents in place until the individual Windows 7 machines hit a refresh cycle at some point in the future?

MBAM 2.0 agent will communicate with upgrades MBAM 2.5 web service endpoints. The only limitation with not upgrading the MBAM 2.0 agent is "you will not be able to leverage the enhancement that comes with MBAM 2.5". MBAM 2.0 agent will use all of the settings defined only for mBAM 2.0.

For e.g. :- There comes a GPO to define grace period to postpone encryption with MBAM 2.5. You will not be able to leverage this setting with MBAM 2.0 agent although you define the settings in GPO. Same is for FIPS support also.
If you want to leverage this setting you need to upgrade the agent to MBAM 2.5.

If you are not concerned with the enhancements that comes with MBAM 2.5 and can work with the settings defined with MBAM 2.0 before upgrade, you will not faced any issues with MBAM 2.0 agent.