Patching is one of those tasks you want to bundle up with some other critical work that you can kick off on the side while you dig into the pizza you expensed for dinner. It is necessary work but never exciting.

So imagine my surprise when I applied ISA 2006 Service Pack 1 and got new features, it was like XP Service Pack 2 all over again :)

New to the ISA Management console is Change Tracking, and once enable will keep detailed records on what really changed after the new guy has implemented an RFC.

This feature is fantastic! Even if you have processes out the wazoo this information will be invaluable when you really want to know why the website really went down.

Change management isn’t the only new feature to ISA 2006; there is also rule testing and traffic simulators (just to name a few). Check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707230.aspx for the full story.