What are the Windows 7 FTP features?

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to transfer files from one server to another. FTP server can be configured easily in order to transfer from one machine to another machine. FTP can be configured in Internet Information Server (IIS).

There are two types of Connection in FTP server. One is Active FTP and another is Passive FTP.

Basically FTP is communicating with 2 ports one it to send the real data and another is command or control port. By default FTP will use the port 21 to transfer the data and port 20 for the command.

Active FTP will make the server connection to be active during the session. Client send request for the data then the server will start transferring the data to the client.

Passive FTP will make the Client connection to be active and it will ask for the post in which the data transfer will happen and once all those are done then it will initiate the data connection.

Passive FTP is more secured than an active FTP.

FTP is not built in with Windows 7, you need to install the FTP in Windows 7 in order to use it. You can install the FTP from the control panel of the Windows 7. Open the control panel and open Programs and Features and click Turn Windows features on or off to turn on the FTP feature in Windows 7 from the Internet Information Server and expand the FTP Server and select all the components to install FTP in Windows 7.

Once FTP is installed in Windows 7 you can see the FTP from IIS management console which is in Control panel's Administrative Tools folder and open Internet Information server and you can see the Installed FTP.

Features that is included in FTP

Integration with IIS

The new FTP is integrated with tightly integrated new administration interface and the old metabase concept for storing the configuration is improved and now it is stored in .NET based web.config format which is easy to edit the configuration.

New Security feature in FTP

It is one of the excellent additions to the new FTP. The new security feature included in FTP is Secured Socket Layer (SSL) which is used to transfer the data in an encrypted way. SSL encryption can be applied to Control Channel or Data Channel or in both. Non windows platforms authentication is also supported to communicate with the new FTP server. So now the developers can make use of the new FTP server from other platforms without using a Windows user account.
UTF8 and IPV6 are also included in the new FTP version. There are two options to authenticate the user. One is using the Web Manager Authentication is used to manage web sites and another one is .NET membership authentication which is used for ASP.NET form based authentication.

FTP and Web Content improvements

The new FTP service with IIS 7.5 make possible to host both FTP and Web content of the web site by including and FTP binding to the existing site makes shared host. The new FTP can handle multiple FTP site name for an IP address. Now you can create virtual directory using per-user virtual directories in order to isolate the users. If the user isolation is enabled then no need to create physical directory for each account, but in order to share the folder between more than one FTP users, you need to create virtual directory instead of the physical directory for each of the users.

Enhanced Logging features

Logging functionality in new FTP is improved in to include all FTP traffics, included unique Session ID session to identify the FTP session uniquely for session tracking; Additional detailed information such as all the columns or specific columns can also be included for recording the errors to fix it easily and many more other information can also be recorded in the log. Error message will be display for the local users in an FTP server. Event logging is also included which will give additional information and it will be helpful for troubleshooting the issues.

Virtual directory Available bytes, Long dates can be made visible to the FTP client. Available memory will be useful to know the available space in the FTP server.