What are some of the major reasons for using ISA Server 2000 over another firewall?

Notice that all of these reasons relate to secure Exchange Server Publishing. OK, there are a lot of other reasons to use ISA Server 2000 as your firewall of choice for protecting a Microsoft network, but this article is meant to be an introduction to the ISA Server 2000 Exchange Server 2000/2003 Deployment Kit, so I’ll stick with the stuff that deals with Exchange.

That’s right! I want to take this opportunity to announce the first beta of the ISA Server 2000 Exchange Server 2000/2003 Deployment Kit. This kit was designed to help ISA Server 2000 administrators set up secure remote access to their Exchange Server located on the internal network behind the ISA Server firewall. The content of the kit was determined by what I saw to be the most common problems appearing in the ISASever.org Web boards and mailing list, as well as the ISA Server newsgroups over at msnews.microsoft.com.

I felt that ISA Server 2000 Exchange Server 2000/2003 Deployment Kit would be well received because of the great success people have had getting their ISA Server firewall/VPN servers up and running using the recently released ISA Server 2000 VPN Deployment Kit. The VPN kit had over 25,000 downloads and has generated millions on hits in the month since it was released and it indicated to me that there is a big demand for the type of information, and the style of presentation, that was provided by the ISA Server 2000 VPN Deployment Kit.

The ISA Server 2000 Exchange Server 2000/2003 Deployment Kit documents use the same style and presentation as the VPN kit docs. All the docs provided detailed step by step procedures and screenshots of almost each step so that you never had to guess at what I’m telling you to do. The steps also contain explanations of confusing dialog boxes or options so that you don’t have to guess at what might be the right option; the explanations allow you to choose the correct option with confidence.

At this point I need your help to make the kit better. I need input from the ISAServer.org community. Feedback for the following issues is especially important:

The goal of the ISA Server 2000 Exchange Server 2000/2003 Deployment Kit is to make it as easy as possible to put together a secure remote access email solution that allows your offsite users secure access to their mailboxes on your internal network Exchange Server. These docs should walk you through ever ISA Server related step required to allow inbound access to all the Exchange Server services.

One thing the kit does not contain is detailed information on the installation and configuration of the Exchange Server. The reason for this is the kit is already quite large with the focus being the ISA Server firewall configuration. There is some information on how to configure aspects of the Exchange Server, such as how to bind a Web site certificate to an Exchange Server service and how to request the Web site certificate. But, there is no detailed discussion of the specifics of Exchange Server configuration that do not bear a direct relationship with ISA Server Exchange Server services publishing.

At this time I only have the HTML online versions of the kit available. The final version of the kit will include Microsoft Word format docs so that you can take notes in the doc itself, or customize the doc to serve your specific needs. The goal of these docs is to make remote access to your ISA Server firewall protected Exchange Servers.

You can find the Table of Contents for the ISA Server 2000 Exchange Server 2000/2003 Deployment Kit at www.tacteam.net/isaserverorg/exchangekit/default.htm. If you have any suggestions on how to improve these docs, send me an email at tshinder@tacteam.net.