Certification authority Web enrollment services

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Certification authority Web enrollment services

A set of certification authority (CA) Web pages is provided with Certificate Services in Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition; Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition; and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition. These Web pages provide a simple user interface to perform many of the common user tasks on a CA, and they are installed by default when you set up Certificate Services.

These Web enrollment pages allow you to connect to the CA via a Web browser and perform common tasks, such as requesting certificates from a CA, requesting the CA's certificate, submitting a certificate request using a PKCS #10 file, retrieving the CA's certificate revocation list (CRL) or performing smart card certificate enrollment. For a stand-alone CA, the Web pages are the primary way a certificate requester can interface with the CA, since the Certificates snap-in cannot be used to request certificates from a stand-alone CA. Enterprise CAs can accept certificate requests via the Certificates snap-in or the Web enrollment pages.

You can install Web enrollment pages for a CA on a Windows server 2003 family server that is not a CA in order to divert Web-based traffic from the actual CA. For more information about installing the Web pages on a server that is not a CA, see Set up certification authority Web enrollment support. You can also configure your Web server to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption to protect the network traffic that contains the enrollment request and response. This is especially important when clients are using Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition and Windows 2000 because of their handling of certificates.

For more information about using the Web enrollment pages, see Using Windows 2000 Certificate Services Web pages or Using Windows Server 2003 Certificate Services Web pages.