It wasn't long ago... we were Celebrating America's Birthday! But what could we have done different...

With the fireworks blasting, and lawns a watering, I sit here admiring all the simple things in life.  Learning IIS isn't one of them....

It is called Internet Information Services.  I have spent the past 4 years concentrating my life on trying to understand the many differences that exist in the various versions that we have released. 

There was IIS 4, which was at its prime when i joined Microsoft in '00, that was the foundation of the future.  It had introduced ASP to the market place and growth was massive in the ISAPi development. 

It was so important that Microsoft took the time to develop and write a course to help the many, many newly acquantied administrators tasked with understanding this robust product.  The test, which I passed back in ~1998 timeframe, required me to remember where the configuration (aka metabase)was stored and then how to get a website to listen on and IP Address, Port, or maybe the “advanced” technique of Host Headers.

6 years later, ironically, I sit here with a very vast understanding of the IIS 4, 5, and new 6 versions of IIS and grimis at the top support issues that plague Microsoft and our customers.

In 1998, administrators were at their prime and honestly many were grabbing their certifications at a incredible rate.  We were testing them on the “issue of the days” as they often say...

It is because of this that I recently brought to the attention of folks that we (Microsoft) need to re-assess our education avenues for IIS administrators.  We could continue to send resources to customer sites to “teach” them our product for which they have little desire to move to sense they spent the last 6 years figuring out how our product “really works.”  They now have mechanisms in place to circumvent all the various gaps that exist in our legacy products... 

Only now, after years of pain and suffering, we have a platform which we can truely say delivers on all cylinders.

I made the statement that many, many customers simply are not interested in listening to Microsoft regarding IIS 6.0 because they are so upset that we haven't spent the past few years teaching them how to “do more, with less.”  Instead, we said install it and figure it out...I would have liked to think that an IIS administrator exam would at minimum test these skills -

• How is the metabase designed - do you know where the bindings are stored, host headers are configured, and where to find settings like AuthTypes, etc.
• NTLM - what environment is it designed to be used in?  Does it work on the Internet in “typical scenarios“
• Can you isolate an application in order to successfully determine why the application doesn't seem to working?
• What process are ISAPI filters run in?  What can a developer do with an ISAPI filter?
• Debugging, Debugging, and more debugging - it is an art more than a science

Instead of testing these skills of our IIS administrators, they (IIS Administrators) are instead knee deep in understanding how to setup Windows 2003, Active Directory, and other various components of Windows 2003.  Oh, then there is DNS, Group Policy, all of which dedicated IIS Adminstrators spend a total of 5 percent of their time.  There is also the need to understand how you can isolate one active directory “site” from another active directory “site”.  The list goes on and on...

This isn't the “site“ we IIS Admins spend our time consumed with, is it?

I know that these are the topics that all of you IIS Administrators have to learn because I have to spend my days this week, this month deciphering all these random but utterly non-relevant (in my job) facts in order to walk into a testing center and prove I know things - just that - things.  This all to improve my marketability to employers who are hiring me to manage their massive web applications running on their many internal web servers.

...I would have rather walked in and had someone hand me a blank sheet of paper, pencil, and directed me to the terminal and it said - enable Perl CGI's to work on your IIS 6.0 server, edit the metabase directly and customize the name of the Default Web Site, restore the metabase after a change proved ineffective, or worse, attach a debugger to an IIS process and produce a memory dump to locate the source of a process hang. 

The fact is the product I love - I simply adore - can't seem to be pushed to the forefront of the minds of those who make the course and testing decisions.  Until they do (and if you are the one, call me, I am confident it will only take 15 minutes and one usability study to prove to you that we should be a 1st class citizen), I will keep memorizing random facts and taking endless practice exams to learn facts that I simply don't care about...

Oh well, maybe one day I will roll out of bed to know that we actually have a benchmark of knowledge for my fellow IIS administrators...Until then - I will keep answering the same questions about IIS security, authentication, administrative command-liine tools, and oh certainly on debugging.

Yawn...Happy Birthday America!

~Chris