Here are the things that I like:

• Real Time Visitor Log – this is a very cool feature as it shows in real time who is on your site, where they came from and what they do:
  
• Hourly Visits Chart – shows number of visits throughout the day
  
• Real-Time-ness in general – all the reports, such as keywords, referring sites and search engines, visitors, etc are available for today, as opposed to previous day in Google Analytics. This allows to immediately react to any problems that may occur on the site throughout the day.
• Ability to opt-out – any visitor can opt out from being recorded for web analytics purposes. For example I have opted out myself so that my own visits to my site do not skew the statistics.

Piwik is available in the Web Application Gallery and there are several ways you can try it out:

• Use Web Platform Installer to setup Piwik on your IIS server;
• Use Microsoft WebMatrix to setup Piwik on a development machine, try it out and then deploy on a hosting server;
• And finally use one of the free cloud hosting preview offers listed here http://www.iis.net/previewoffers.

The setup experience for Piwik on any of those hosting preview servers is very simple. Once you register your account, create a MySQL database that will be used by Piwik:

Make sure to take note of the database server name that hosts your newly created database – you will need to enter it later during Piwik installation procedure.

After that go to the Gallery tab, use the search box to find Piwik and then follow the simple installation steps.

On the database setup page enter the database connectivity settings that you’ve obtained when you created a new MySQL database:

Specify the site you want to track:

and then copy the provided JavaScript code and add it to your site’s pages. That completes the installation procedure and now you should be able to see the Piwik dashboard:

• Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications.
• Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3.
• Ability to add new PHP extensions. When pointed to a PHP extension file, the PHP Manager will copy it to the right location and will enable the extension in php.ini file.

In addition, several bugs were fixed in this release. The complete list of changes can be found in the change list.

PHP Manager can now be installed with Web Platform Installer. Use the link below to install it:

Now, with the release of Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta (Web PI), the task of enabling PHP on Windows OS has become the easiest it has ever been. Here are the three simple steps you need to follow:

1. Go to http://php.iis.net/
2. Click on the big blue button “Click to Install PHP on IIS”.
   
   This will prompt you to install Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta if you do not have it already.
3. After Web Platform Installer is launched the PHP option will be automatically selected. Click Install button to start the installation.
   
   Note: on a very first run of Web PI, the PHP option might be not selected automatically. In that case you can manually select it under: “Web Platform”/”Frameworks and Runtime” category.

The nice thing about this installation process is that Web PI knows about all the dependencies for PHP and it will download and install all the required components prior to installing PHP itself. For example, if you are installing PHP on Windows XP with IIS 5.1, then WebPI will download and install FastCGI extension. If PHP is being installed on Windows Server 2008, then Web PI will enable FastCGI module, which is built-in to IIS 7.

Finally Web PI will download and run the installer for non-thread-safe build of PHP 5.2.9-1 from http://windows.php.net/download/. PHP installer will perform all the necessary configurations steps in PHP, IIS and FastCGI. So by the end of the installation process you will have the IIS and PHP ready to run your PHP applications on Windows.