ISA Server Service Pack 2: My Favorite Features

You’ve all no doubt already seen the official announcements about the recent release of ISA Server Service Pack 2. So I won’t use this blog as a platform to tout the official stance. Instead, I’m going to give my personal two cents on this release.

This release is exciting for me! I’ve been working with customers for several years now, listening to how they use ISA Server’s great features to provide secure access across networks. I’ve also heard a lot of (often legitimate) pain points from the customers. I’ve heard requests for missing features. I’ve heard requests for more self-help.

What’s nice about the recent SP2 release is that it really addresses both the request for specific new features--requests that we heard directly from customers--with the necessary hot fixes always included in any service pack.

You’ll be reading a lot about how SP2 helps improve the branch office solution introduced in ISA Server 2004. The new features--HTTP compression, BITS caching, and traffic prioritization--all help improve branch office interoperability. You can read more about these features here.

One nice new feature is the certificate alerting system that we added. These new alerts should help you better troubleshoot issues that you might experience when invalid certificates are used, or when certificates expire. This feature impacts so many areas of the ISA Server products--in fact, everywhere that a certificate might be used. This could be in Web publishing scenarios. This could be in Configuration Storage server connections.

My favorite new feature in Service Pack 2 is the Customer Experience Improvement Program. I’m looking forward to learning more about how you experience the product, and to using this feedback to help us shape future improvements. You can read more about this program here.

So, go install ISA Server Service Pack 2--for Enterprise Edition or for Standard Edition.

Billy Ostrow

ISA Server Product Team