In IIS 7, however, features operate modularly. You can load them in any combination and with no dependencies and really create a lean, mean server that does what you want it to do very well -- and it does nothing else. You also gain the benefit of IIS 7's extensibility: It's easier than ever to write a custom module that plugs directly into the IIS core to enable special functionality for your operation.

IIS 7 can be configured from a text file.

Taking another page from Apache's playbook, each setting in any site configured within IIS can be edited directly from the web.config file. Aside from the obvious convenience, this is a boon for companies that host large numbers of Web sites. It's now trivial to deploy an identical configuration across thousands of sites in seconds; you can just copy web.config to each site and you are finished.

You can also delegate administration of certain sections of web.config to other people, so that a bit of control is available for, say, individual site owners while not necessarily requiring everyone to contact the IIS administrator for any changes to be made. Version control is equally simple -- just make several different versions of a text file, store them in some organized fashion and retrieve when necessary. Very cool.

The management interface for IIS 7 has been completely designed and is now more task-oriented.