Introduction to IIS

IIS is an application providing many network services, including World Wide Web (WWW) publishing, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), Web Authoring Distributing and Versioning (WebDAV), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) virtual service, a web services platform, and many other applications and functionalities. It natively supports many languages and protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, HTML, VBScript, JScript, ASP, and ASP.NET protocols and languages. Its default functionality can be extended using modules, .NET, ISAPI programs, handler programs, scripting, controls, SMTP, and more.

IIS was originally only installed on Microsoft's file server products, but starting with Windows 2000, was also available for enterprise workstation clients (for example, Vista Ultimate edition). IIS is not installed by default with Windows Vista, but can be installed or activated with minimal effort. When installed and activated, IIS installs with a bare minimum of services unless otherwise configured.

Note 

In the past, IIS was not available on Home editions of Microsoft Windows, but IIS 7 is available on Windows Vista Home Premium Edition.

Table 9-1 shows popular IIS versions and their default operating systems.

Table 9-1: IIS Versions and Platforms
Open table as spreadsheet

IIS VERSION	DEFAULT OS
4.0	Windows NT 4.0 Server (NT 4.0 Workstation ran the Personal Web Server application)
5.0	Windows 2000 Server or Workstation
5.1	Windows XP Professional
6.0	Windows Server 2003 and XP Pro 64-bit version
7.0	Windows Vista/Longhorn