FZAMI

I guess they assumed you wanted external access hence wanted to install IIS. It is standard practice to use SSL for external access. Your MIS data is after all very sensitive and you wouldn't want to access it un-encrypted over the public internet. I would even go further - you shouldn't even access it unencrypted internally. You don't know who is outside your school with a wireless device. To secure the IIS you do need commercial SSL certificates which you have to pay for. There is a fair bit of configuration to get the security hardened/enforcing HTTPS conenctions and blocking HTTP conenctions. For external access you need a public facing IP address and external DNS etc and all this costs money. I believe Link2ICT do all this for their schools in Birmingham and hence the charge. If you are expecting them to support your setup I understand where they are coming from.

You do know that Tomcat default port is 8080 which you need to specify with your URL? IIS of course uses standard port 80 for HTTP. If you don't believe me try it now. Turn off your IIS service and use http://:8080/eportal. You will get the login screen. Trust me I have been using it for years.

The notes show you how to configure IIS, they don't say you need IIS. I have been using eportal internally for many years and have never configured IIS - in fact I have never added IIS role to the server. I rely purely on Tomcat. As we only access it internally I want to keep things simple.

Are you sure? Advanced Learning provide Apache Tomcat as an alternative to IIS to host web pages.

Can I ask why do you need to configure IIS if you don't use eportal externally? Eportal works fine internally without any additional configuration.