Aside from another Black Tuesday, Microsoft also announced changes to its enterprise and personal security offerings: a new service pack for ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) Server 2004 as well as Microsoft's subscription-based OneCare Live offering.

Because this is Enterprise Windows, I'll start there with the release of ISA Server 2004 SP 2, which just became available as I was writing this.

I'm also starting with ISA 2004 SP2 because the update has quite a bit of meat to it in terms of new features, although most of them are aimed at remote or branch office connectivity and management. Managing an ISA-based security infrastructure across a bunch of WAN links with varying sizes seems Microsoft's main target with this release, and the company has addressed it fairly well.

First, you'll find support for BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) caching. BITS is a file transfer protocol that first reared its head under Windows Update. It's Microsoft's way of providing more efficient update rollouts by doing small-chunk data transfers, using all available bandwidth, and supporting breaks in bandwidth or transmissions. Under ISA Server, BITS allows for more easily managed server security updates and also manages the bandwidth usage of other servers behind the ISA machine.

Making even better use of WAN bandwidth is ISA's new support for HTTP compression. This allows ISA's proxy server functionality to serve up cached Web content much faster, especially across slimmer WAN pipes. Again, mainly a branch or telecommuter-type feature set is in this scenario.