Unable to find the socket transport "https"

I'm using this to check for the availability of a URL:

$fp = fsockopen($url, 443, $errno, $errstr);

and I get this error back...

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to https://example.com/soapserver.php:443 (Unable to find the socket transport "https" - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?) in C:\Home etc etc....

I'm using an IIS server btw,( no its not my doing! ) so I think its something to do with not having open-ssl, but I'm not sure. Can anyone help please?

I did a phpinfo() and I do have ssl, but on IMAP and cURL, thats all.

Any ideas?

also for ssl you need to prefix the host with ssl://