What's New and Improved in ISA Server 2006
ISA Server 2006 offers the following new and improved features:
On This Page
 | Secure remote access to internal Microsoft servers |
| Virtual private networking |
| Management |
| Advanced firewall protection |
| Authentication |
| Server publishing |
| Performance |
Secure remote access to internal Microsoft servers
| New or Improved | Feature | Description |
Improved | Outlook Web Access Publishing Wizard. | Clientless remote access through SSL connections form the core of SSL VPNs. The ISA Server 2006 Outlook Web Access Publishing Wizard walks you through creating a firewall rule and creates the Outlook Web Access SSL connection to your Exchange server. All network elements can be created in the wizard, and you never need to leave the wizard to create a policy element. |
New | SharePoint Server Publishing Wizard. | A new wizard publishes multiple Windows SharePoint Services sites simultaneously and provides for automatic link translation. |
New | Integrated support for Exchange 2007 | Support for the Exchange 2007 feature set is built-in to ISA Server 2006. |
Virtual private networking
| New or Improved | Feature | Description |
New | Branch Office VPN Connectivity Wizard | This wizard automatically configures a site-to-site VPN connection between two separate offices. |
Management
| New or Improved | Feature | Description |
Improved | Easy-to-use wizards | New configuration wizards exist for publishing Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange, and general Web sites. A new Branch Office VPN Connectivity Wizard exists for configuring site-to-site VPN connections. |
Improved | Certificate Management | It is now possible to utilize multiple certificates per Web listener and to use different certificates per array member. ISA Server 2006 is improved to simplify certificate management and reduce the total cost of ownership associated with using certificates when publishing Web sites. |
Improved | Hardware-based ISA Server appliances | ISA Server 2006 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition are now available in preconfigured hardware. |
Improved | Propagation of enterprise-wide policy | Underlying architecture is improved to provide for more efficiency. |
Advanced firewall protection
| New or Improved | Feature | Description |
Improved | Firewall Rule wizards | ISA Server 2006 includes a new set of rule wizards that make it easier to create access policy. ISA Server 2006 access policy can be created by a sophisticated firewall rule that you can use to configure any required policy element. You do not need to leave the rule wizard to create a network object. Any network object or relationship can be created within the new wizard. |
New | Flood Resiliency | A new Flood Resiliency feature protects ISA Server 2006 from being permanently unavailable, compromised, or unmanageable during a flooding attack. |
New | Enhanced remediation during attack | Flood Resiliency provides enhanced remediation during attacks through log throttling, control of memory consumption, and control of pending DNS queries. |
Authentication
| New or Improved | Feature | Description |
Improved | Authentication | Users can be authenticated using built-in Windows, LDAP, RADIUS, or RSA SecurID authentication. Front-end and back-end configuration has been separated, providing for more flexibility and granularity. Single sign on is supported for authentication to Web sites. Rules can be applied to users or user groups in any namespace. Third-party vendors can use the SDK to extend these built-in authentication mechanisms. |
New | Single sign on | Single sign on allows users to access a group of published Web sites without being required to authenticate with each Web site. |
Improved | Forms-based authentication | Forms-based authentication is now available for all published Web sites, and not just for Outlook Web Access. |
Improved | Session management | ISA Server 2006 includes improved control of cookie-based sessions to provide for better security. |
New | Support for LDAP authentication | LDAP authentication allows ISA Server to authenticate to Active Directory without being a member of the domain. |
Server publishing
| New or Improved | Feature | Description |
Improved | Link translation | Some published Web sites may include references to internal names of computers. Because only the ISA Server 2006 firewall and external namespace, and not the internal network namespace, are available to external clients, these references appear as broken links. ISA Server 2006 includes a link translation feature that you can use to create a dictionary of definitions for internal computer names that map to publicly known names. ISA Server 2006 implements link translation automatically during Web publishing. |
New | Cross-Array Link Translation | This feature allows links in Web content containing an internal server name to be translated to the public name even if the Web content is published in a different array. |
Performance
| New or Improved | Feature | Description |
New | BITS caching | ISA Server 2006 provides the caching mechanism for data received through BITS. Any cache rule that you create can be enabled to cache BITS data. |
New | Web Publishing Load Balancing | ISA Server 2006 will automatically balance the request stream coming from a remote user to an array of published servers. |
New | HTTP compression | HTTP compression reduces file size by using algorithms to eliminate redundant data during transmission of HTTP packets. |
New | Diffserv (Quality of Service) | ISA Server 2006 includes a new packet prioritization functionality (provided by the Diffserv Web filter), which scans the URL or domain and assigns a packet priority using Diffserv bits. |