⚠️ Quality deterioration of the "Forticlient EMS" product

[mia]

Hi,
I wanted to publicly report the continuous deterioration of the Forticlient EMS product.
It's supposed to be one of Fortinet's flagship products, but it's full of bugs. I've been following it from version 7.0 up to the latest version 7.2 which I can say is the worst version.

The features I use are really basic, no strange settings, the ForticlientEMS is not connected to the Fortigate via Security Fabric, I just have to run, for example, IPSEC VPNs that start when Windows or Smartphone Android are turned on (for smartphones, I'm sorry to say, it sucks).

I have opened dozens of tickets to Fortinet support and almost all of them are categorized as "Bug identified". I have tickets still open from mid 2022 and they are not resolved.
Before opening the report I read ALL the guides (https://docs.fortinet.com/product/forticlient/7.2) but nothing, every problem solved in one version created two.
I wonder if softwares are tested before being published.

Fortinet, if you really wanted to remove the login before logon from the free version of Forticlient at least make it work in the paid version (EMS).

The worst thing is to discover that version 7.0.8 came out after 7.2 and now that I'm at 7.2 (updated because this version seemed to fix problems with 7.0.7) I can't downgrade since, in a test machine, the version 7.0.8 seems to work quite well compared to the others.

Advice for customers in my situation: don't upgrade to 7.2, stay at 7.0.8 both client-side and server-side.

I felt I had to share this feedback.

[gfleming]

Sorry to hear about your issues. But I think the biggest takeaway here is that if you're using basic/established features of a product there is never a reason to run the latest feature release train—of any software.

You could even be on 6.4 which would be most stable.

[mia]

Hi,
version 7.0.X didn't work well either, the zero trust tags were completely ignored if the vpn started when windows started.
However, it was your technicians who suggested upgrading to 7.2 for my problems and these have increased. Instead of creating new features I believe it would fix the current problems and not add more entropy to the operation of the ForticlientEMS product.

We look forward to version 7.2.1, hoping it will be the solution to the various problems.

[Cajuntank]

I keep a 100 user license of this just in the hopes that it does mature enough to think about swapping back to it. I bought back when EMS was v1.2 and FortiClient was a 5.x to use as my AV solution for my PCs and MacBooks (which accounts for 90% of my computers). No issues to really speak of. Version 6, I started having all kinds of issues. Very buggy for me at these initial version 6 revs. One huge bug for me was, my clients were losing connectivity to my EMS for no reason at all it seemed. I could manually get them back connected, but when you are talking about over 5K devices and most are K-12 students, there is just no way. There was not even a way to automate to force that connectivity back that we ever found. That and weird behaviors the AV would have with Apple AirPlay, etc... was just too much and we went with another product. I hated losing that client telemetry, but there were just too many issues to overcome at that time with the product for me. Note, I will say that my problems were 99.9% macOS and FortiClient involved as I could count on one hand the issues I had with Windows.