Chapter 1: Introducing IIS 6

We’ll begin our overview of IIS 6 by examining the many new features and enhancements Microsoft has included in the latest version of their popular web server platform. These enhancements were designed to increase the security, reliability, scalability, performance, and manageability of the product, and they range from fundamental changes in underlying architecture and operation to cosmetic improvements in the user interface for administration.

This chapter and the next (“IIS 6 Architecture”) will provide the background necessary for later chapters dealing with issues such as deployment, configuration, management, monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting IIS. Also included in this chapter is a brief history of the different versions of IIS and an overview of Microsoft’s new Windows Server 2003 operating system family (of which IIS is a component) and how the different flavors of Windows Server 2003 relate to IIS.

The IIS Story

Those of us who have been working in the IT field for a while may remember the abrupt about-face Microsoft made in 1995 with regard to the Internet. Realizing that they were about to be left behind by companies like Netscape, Microsoft suddenly shifted gears from a position of “The Internet? Who cares?” to a policy of building Internet functionality into all of their products and giving this functionality away for free. It was one of the smartest business moves in all history, and an incredibly fast move for a company as large as Microsoft. To the popular mind, the centerpiece of Microsoft’s strategy was the Internet Explorer web browser, which Microsoft gave away for free and soon incorporated into their 16- and 32-bit Microsoft Windows operating system platforms. The result of this action was the infamous “Browser Wars” of the late 1990s, where Microsoft and Netscape furiously competed with each other by incorporating more and more features in their browser platforms as new versions came out with breakneck speed. No one doubts now that Microsoft won the war, though at the time some parties thought they did so unfairly, which resulted in a series of lawsuits that culminated in the famous legal battle between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton era. Microsoft seems to have won that battle, though a number of states decided that the Department of Justice let Microsoft off too lightly and are still pursuing legal action against the company at the time of writing this book.

While the battle between browsers may have captivated the public imagination, a far more earnest battle began taking place in IT shops during the same time period, and has continued to this day. This is the battle for server supremacy, or: who will control the content on the Internet? Microsoft has been waging this war on several fronts, including web servers (IIS vs. Apache), Internet mail servers (Exchange vs. Sendmail), web application programming (Active Server Pages vs. Perl), and web portals (MSN vs. AOL). Any of these topics could form the basis of a whole book in itself, but it’s the first of these, the battle for web server supremacy, that provides the underlying excitement for this new release of IIS. Will the new features and enhancements found in version 6 finally make IIS the server of choice for enterprise environments? Can IIS recover from its checkered reputation in earlier versions as a product full of security holes? Has Linux built up enough momentum in the enterprise to convince IT decision makers to start switching from IIS back to Apache? And is version 6 of IIS secure and reliable enough to enable Microsoft to regain the trust of IT departments after its mistakes and oversights in earlier versions?

Exciting, isn’t it? Makes you want to learn all about IIS 6, doesn’t it? Well if it does, read on!