Server applications are responsible for naming objects, therefore you must be knowledgeable about the naming convention used. Verbs are important and you should know which verb or verbs are provided by the application and their order of importance. The registration database contains an entry for each OLE-compliant server application with the class name of each object and the supported verbs. A server application may support one or more class names.
There are two conditions that affect communication between server and client applications. A server can block all OLE messages from the client, in which case they will be queued and processed when the server is freed. The client is unaware that the server is blocked and it must wait for an operation to be started or completed. Servers typically alerts client applications of busy conditions, thus freeing the client to either retry its communication or go on to another task.
Error reporting and recovery is also important to server applications.
Server applications may incorporate both DDE and OLE protocols. This requires that you understand the methods used to distinguish between OLE and DDE conversations and the techniques for handling OLE operations.