ISA Server 2006 provides security for corporate applications accessed over the Internet by pre-authenticating users before they gain access to published servers, inspecting even encrypted traffic at the application layer in a stateful manner, and providing automated publishing tools. In addition, by providing HTTP compression, caching of content including software updates, and site-to-site VPN capabilities integrated with application-layer filtering, it enables you to securely expand corporate networks. It also enables you to manage and protect your network with a hybrid proxy-firewall architecture, deep content inspection, granular policies, and comprehensive alerting and monitoring capabilities.
The new features focus on configuration change management and enhanced troubleshooting designed to help you identify and resolve ISA Server configuration issues within the ISA Server Management console.
Latest changes:
- Configuration Change Tracking—Registers all configuration changes applied to ISA Server to help you assess issues that may occur as a result of these changes
- Test Button—Tests the consistency of a Web publishing rule between the published server and ISA Server
- Traffic Simulator—Simulates network traffic in accordance with specified request parameters, such as an internal user and the Web server, providing information about firewall policy rules evaluated for the request
- Diagnostic Logging Viewer—Now integrated as a tab into the ISA Server Management console, this feature displays detailed events on packet progress and provides information about handling and rule matching
- Support for integrated NLB mode in all three modes, including unicast, multicast, and multicast with Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). Previously, ISA Server integrated NLB-supported unicast mode only
- Support for use of server certificates containing multiple Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entries. Previously, ISA Server was able to use either only either the subject name (common name) of a server certificate, or the first entry in the SAN list
- Support for Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) cross-domain authentication. Credentials from users located in a different domain than the ISA Server, but in the same forest, can now be delegated to an internal published Web site by using KCD
- Support for client certificate authentication in a workgroup deployment. This removes the requirement to map each client certificate to an Active Directory® directory user account
