Microsoft ISA Server 2004 Service Pack 2 released

Microsoft just released its second major update for ISA Server 2004.
This service pack fixes a lot of bugs as you can see from the Release Notes, extends support to Windows Server 2003 R2 and SQL Server 2005, but also introduces 3 new features:

• Support for BITS Caching
  ISA Server 2004 SP2 can cache and serve content downloaded with Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)—a file transfer service used by Microsoft Windows Update to download updates and service packs. BITS caching provides a more efficient and effective rollout of updates and fixes by transferring data in small chunks, utilizing unused bandwidth as it becomes available, and reassembling the data at the destination.



• HTTP Compression
  HTTP compression allows ISA Server to request compressed content, and serve compressed content from its Web cache to clients. This enables faster serving of Web pages, which may be useful in branch office scenarios where clients access Web applications over slow links.



• Traffic Prioritization
  Traffic prioritization is a new global setting that can apply to all browser traffic that passes through ISA Server. ISA Server 2004 SP2 supports setting the DiffServ field in Internet Protocol (IP) packets based on Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). The DiffServ field is used to determine the quality of service (QoS) for an IP packet, allowing customers to give higher priority to important applications. DiffServ values for URLs can be configured at both the head office and branch offices allowing for traffic prioritization between locations.

For a deep explaination of these features be sure to check the related TechNet article.

As you may remember the Service Pack 1 was only for the Standard Edition. This time SP2 is for all editions, even if we still have two different binaries:

• ISA Server 2004 Standard Edition SP2


• ISA Server 2004 Enterprise Edition SP2