Overview of the Technology

Glossary

• Component Object Model (COM): A specification that Microsoft developed for building software components that can be assembled into programs, or that add functionality to existing programs running on Microsoft Windows platforms.
• Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP): The Internet protocol that governs the transmission of newsgroups.
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP): A protocol for sending messages from one computer to another on a network; used on the Internet to route e-mail.

IIS has been a component of the Microsoft Windows Server operating system since Microsoft Windows NT 4. It consists of a collection of software services that support Web site creation, configuration, and management, along with other Internet functions. IIS includes such technologies as NNTP and SMTP. Another integral technology is ASP, a server-side scripting environment for creating dynamic, interactive Web server applications. With ASP, you can combine HTML pages, script commands, and calls to COM components that perform a variety of tasks, such as connecting to a database or processing business logic.