Professional IIS 7.0

Chapter 9. Delegating Remote Administration

Many web environments have a need to separate the roles of the system administrators and the web site development and management teams. Whether there are two people in these roles or hundreds, it is necessary for the server administration team to specify the access level and settings for the developers or deployment teams.

In past versions of IIS, the ability to delegate partial administration of a server, web site, or application was very limited. Unless you developed your own tools, it was not possible to configure partial access to the end developers or administrators.

In the area of delegation, IIS 7.0 breaks revolutionary ground in two areas. First, IIS administrators can specify the access the web site administrators should have and provide the IIS Manager tool for them to manage their settings remotely through a user-friendly interface. Second, this same access in IIS Manager also applies to the web.config file. This may seem strange at first because the web.config file used to be for ASP.NET, and it wasn't possible to manage IIS from any type of control file. The advantages of managing some IIS features from the web site's web.config file are huge, the most prominent benefit being that web site tool vendors and developers can create web sites and then copy them using a simple tool like XCopy or FTP.

Delegation isn't just turning on a switch and allowing developers or web site administrators to start work. It requires a lot of planning ...