[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
As the world moves to an increasingly networked environment, applications need to become more manageable. Support for roaming users, remote administration, automatic updates of software, and other similar features are increasingly important and saleable in the enterprise.
For the Designed for Microsoft® Windows® Logo guidelines relating to this area, see the section titled Cooperate with Administrators.
Vendors can contribute a great deal to making their applications manageable in an enterprise environment. Writing all user-specific information to user-profile folders, for example, gives an end-user or administrator the option to store and manage the information on a remote, shared server, which makes possible the support of roaming users, remote installation, and policy-based management.
Note that both Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 support the use of remote user profiles today. For more information, see the Microsoft Windows 95 Resource Kit or the Microsoft Zero Administration Kit.
Windows NT 4.0 provides administrators the ability, through a single interface, to customize aspects of the user's environment and restrict the actions a given user can perform. This enables an administrator to reduce inadvertent actions by end-users and thereby greatly reduce application support costs.
The configuration that an administrator develops for users and computers is referred to as a system policy. The policy actually takes the form of a file that is parsed at logon. The registry settings contained in that file are applied to the registry on the client computer to create a specifically defined environment for the user. When a system policy is applied, the existing user-specific or computer-specific registry settings can be overwritten with the settings the administrator has established in the policy file. This gives the administrator the ability to set restrictions on the client computer and on the end-user.
These policy settings can be applied to a specific user account or computer. These policy settings can also be applied to the group membership of a set of users. With a properly implemented policy, regardless of where a user logs on, that user's environment can be customized to the administrator's specification.
For more information about how your applications can support a networked or managed environment, see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/zaw.