Summary

SBS 2003 SP1 users are fortunate to have a firewall of such capability. Even though this product is complex, it can be easily managed through the use of the ISA Management MMC. The new features in ISA 2004 are easily discovered, managed, and tweaked. After you have a basic understanding of what ISA does and how the MMC is organized, the flow of traffic through the Firewall Policy from the top down becomes clearer.

This chapter only touched on the basics of ISA management. Remember, as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, enterprise administrators make a whole career out of managing ISA. SBS administrators are extraordinary and require knowledge of many server products to make an SBS network function smoothly. The resources listed at the beginning of this chapter should be entered in your favorites list. As your knowledge grows, so too will your question list, and these resources can provide the answers for you.

The ISA 2004 server is pretty well set up and ready to go thanks to the SBS integration team. This leaves the SBS administrator with the task of customizing the server for his particular business needs. After you've completed your logging tweaks, delegation of some administrative tasks, adjusting the client connections, installing the Firewall Client on your client computers as appropriate, increasing the cache, and changing the amount of memory and drive space allocated for various ISA tasks you're ready to tackle some customization and learn how to create new rules.

Your ISA server is ready for action and prepared to handle common and complex hack attempts and Trojan infections all the while providing faster Internet access and securing your communications.