IIS throws away the sometimes confusing, cluttered interface that plagued IIS 4, 5 and 6 and offers a brand new console look. It's now designed to expose more features in a sensible manner to the user while making rapid, large-scale administration across hundreds or thousands of sites quite simple. As with most everything else about IIS 7, the new interface is extensible as well, so you can create custom plug-ins that work directly within the IIS 7 Management Console.

Security has been improved in IIS 7.

It's even over and above that in IIS 6. And compared to IIS 5, which came with Windows 2000, IIS 6 was light-years ahead in the security area. (In fact, for years I called IIS 5 Swiss cheese.)

As Web applications proliferate and the popularity of .Net-based Web sites continues to increase, you'll find IIS taking an even more prominent role in corporate networks. Security is more important than ever given that many of these applications process and store sensitive information.

In IIS 7, .Net applications are run directly within the IIS core itself and are not sent to the Internet Server Application Programming Interface extension; this is more secure and results in faster performance. Essentially, the .Net runtime environment becomes one as the distinction between ASP, .Net code and IIS blurs. You also get the benefit of forms authentication for any type of content, so you can authenticate against a database for just about any page or piece of Web content, not just .Net code.