Getting Ready for IIS 5.0

  • Article

By Megan Davis, Web Technology Writer

Internet Information Services Documentation Team Microsoft Corporation

September 15, 1999

This month TechNet publishes the first article in a series about things you can start doing now to be ready for Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 when it becomes available later this year. These articles will help Web administrators and IT professionals make a smooth transition to IIS 5.0.

As you may know from reading other articles , IIS 5.0 simplifies the setup and administration of Web services and provides many advantages over competing Web servers and previous versions of IIS. With IIS 5.0 Microsoft has emphasized a few key areas, notably security and manageability. New methods of publishing are implemented in this version, and updates and modifications to the ASP model help to improve application processing capacity and efficiency. These new and enhanced features are excellent reasons to migrate or upgrade a Web server to IIS 5.0.

Current users of IIS: If you're already running IIS, the Windows 2000 Server Setup Wizard will take care of the upgrade to version 5.0 for you. The wizard has been greatly improved over the IIS 4.0 setup wizard, and current users of IIS will have few problems making the transition to IIS 5.0.

Users of other Web servers: If you're running another type of Web server, such as Netscape Enterprise Server or Apache HTTP Server, you'll need to transfer your configuration settings and content, as well as your Web applications, over to the IIS environment. These articles will provide useful information for this process, as well as for running IIS with other Web servers.

The three articles in this series are:

  • Understanding the Migration Process This article provides an overview of the steps involved in migrating enterprise Web services to IIS 5.0. It's important to understand these steps before embarking on project planning, which is covered in detail in the next article.

  • Planning a Web Services Migration Project This article gives you an outline to follow when planning a migration project that involves several Web servers in an enterprise network. It will include a number of templates you can use for surveying your resources and creating planning documents and schedules. This information can help you plan your project no matter what type of Web server technology you currently use.

  • Basic Steps to Migrate a Web Server to IIS 5.0 This article, the last in the series, will take a "nuts and bolts" approach, providing information on migrating configuration settings and content to a server running IIS 5.0 from another type of Web server. This article is intended to help people migrating to IIS from another type of Web server, such as Apache HTTP Server or Netscape Enterprise Server.