At the June 1996 IETF meeting in Montreal, the PPTP Forum companies presented PPTP to the IETF's PPP Extensions working group as an Internet Draft standard. The working group agreed to the proposal, which includes converging PPTP and Cisco's Layer 2 Forwarding approach to tunneling in the months ahead. The PPTP technical specification is now updated and available as an IETF Internet Draft. Sample source code is also available via the World Wide Web so vendors and businesses can implement PPTP solutions on a variety of operating systems and hardware platforms.
This is good news for the industry as a variety of proprietary tunneling methods were available in the past, but no standard. Movement toward this standard signals an opportunity for remote access system vendors, Internet Service Providers, and firewall vendors to provide great value-added benefits for their customers. PPTP-enabled systems can now be deployed with the confidence that Microsoft will ensure compatibility with the PPTP standard as it evolves through the IETF and into the future.