SoftCom Corporate Blog

Things are always changing in the web hosting industry, and it’s our job to stay on top of them. We’ve been hearing about Longhorn for years, but now we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The release of Longhorn will soon become a reality with the release of Windows Server 2008 early next year.

But what will that mean for you? Part of Windows Server 2008 is IIS7, or Internet Information Services version 7. IIS7 is the web server application that is one of the core pieces of the puzzle, at least for hosting companies and customers. And so in advance of the Windows Server 2008 release, we’ve prepared a beta program for you to try out IIS7. This beta will give you the opportunity to test the platform and give you a jump on getting ready for the official release of IIS7 and Windows Server 2008.

Here’s a brief list of just a few of the features you’ll see in IIS7:

• A Flexible and more extensible web server for developing and deploying web applications
• A fully modular architecture consisting of 40 pluggable modules, built on top of all public extensibility APIs
• Use the web framework of your choice including classic ASP and ASP.NET
• Distributed configuration system that enables settings to be stored in web.config files so applications can be easily XCopy deployed and preconfigured
• Minimize development and downtime through powerful new diagnostic capabilities including access to runtime info and automatically tracing failed requests
• More scalable web server for delivering reliable web hosting to a broader set of customers

For more information, check out IIS.net. And although it’s a bit old, this interview at the O’Reilly Windows DevCenter may also be of interest.

Initial reports indicated that FrontPage Server Extensions weren’t going to be supported under Windows Server 2008, but recently we’ve heard that there are now plans to support them. This is good news for Windows hosting users with legacy FrontPage generated content!

Of course we’ll keep you up-to-date with any further news and developments… And in the meantime you can log into your Control Panel and activate your IIS7 Beta account today.

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.