The characteristics of global interfaces are listed below.

• Can be activated whenever an application wishes to use the interface. This means IME can be inactive.
• Does not have IME context information.
• Must be in the COM format where an interface is defined by class id and interface id.
• Each language will have a unique class id. For example, Japanese MS-IME will have a class id named CLSID_MSIME_JAPANESE.

New version of an interface must use a new interface id.

Please refer to the COM Specification when implementing or using COM interface.

Currently following interfaces are provided in this format.

IFECommon, IFELanguage and IFEDictionary

CIMEShare

IImePad, IImePadApplet

Class Id

Class id and interface ids for the MS-IME are defined in a header file "msime.h". Another way of obtaining class id is to get the CLSID string from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSIME.x.y where x is the country name and y is the version number. For Japanese IME98, the country name is "japan" and the version number is 6. Including the "initguid.h" file before "msime.h" defines class ids as static data for a DLL or an executable. The initguid.h file is only included once.