Appendix D. Summary of Changes

Summary of Changes from Specification 1.19 Draft to 1.2 Specification

Added intro—"Who is this Specification for"
Added Requirement 1.10—"Clients of distributed applications must comply with the Desktop Application Specification" to clarify the content that was previously covered in the note "Client and Server as used in this specification."
Added Appendix B "Browser-Hosted Applications"
Added Appendix C "Usage of Non-Compliant 3^rd-Party Components"

Dropped Requirement 2.1—"Check for access and availability of resources during install." This is generally adopted today as a good practice and we believe this will be done without putting it in the Specification. This will save testing costs.
Clarified the "Do not overwrite files with older versions" to be specific to no proprietary files and shared files.

Rewrote Requirement 4.1—This is now "Use Active Directory appropriately." We focus on two scenarios—publishing to Active Directory to enable binding between client and server components, and using information in Active Directory.
Replaced Requirement 4.2. This is now "Document the storage and replication impact of your application." The previous requirement was "Do not store data in Active Directory that changes more often than once every 48 hours on a regular basis." This rewrite better addresses the varying needs of enterprises and equips them with the information to evaluate the replication impact of your application in their environment.
Added requirement—"Document your application's use of objects and attributes in the base schema."
Modified requirements size limitations to include objects as well as attributes.
Updated the schema naming convention to focus only on company name instead of DNS name. Microsoft will provide a registration service for these names to ensure uniqueness.
Extended exemption to June 1, 2000.
Added Best Practice—Run without NetBIOS in Windows 2000-only environment
Added Pretest section

Rewrote chapter to allow more flexibility in the deciding when to publish or locate info from active directory. The previous Requirements 4.1 and 4.2 were folded into one requirement, which is now 4.1.
Added 3 requirements to provide guidance as to what type of information should go into AD. To preserve network bandwidth, data that is stored in AD must be reasonably small, must not change often too large, and must be globally interesting.
Modification to rules for extending the schema:
- Changed the naming convention to focus on DNS name only. The year of registration is no longer required as part of the attribute name.
- An exemption will be allowed for applications that have already established naming conventions, provided these naming conventions are registered with MS by March 1, 2000.
- Added requirement regarding specification of Link-ID

Rewrote requirements to focus on testable behavior. Many of the previous requirements were prescriptive guidelines to help meet the ultimate requirements of properly handling failover. These are still included as guidelines to help developers meet the core testable requirements. While there are fewer guidelines, this does not represent a softening of the spec. Rather we want to focus on what will be tested.
Added pretest steps

Requirement 5.1 ("Configure the server to run under the appropriate service account") was rewritten to be clearer. It is now "Document services that require more than user-level privileges to run."
Requirement 5.2 ( "Connection Authentication using client credentials") was rewritten to focus more clearly on Single Sign-On.
Requirement 5.3 (Impersonation of the Client") was made a recommendation. Issue is that for applications that have server private data, it is not always feasible or appropriate to impersonate the client.
Rewrote pretest steps

Renamed the requirement "Check access to and availability of resources before install" to "Before install, check for file system access, sufficient disk space, and registry access."

Reorganized the chapters to focus on server apps. Client portions (except for those in the Security, Active Directory, and Clustering chapters) eliminated, because these are covered in the desktop specification.
We are postponing the requirement to use Windows Installer for server-based applications until we can provide greater support in the Windows Installer to natively support select server needs. We updated the install chapter to reflect this, and absorbed relevant info from the old "Component Sharing" into this new chapter. Use of the Windows Installer is still appropriate for many server applications, thus it is strongly recommend that vendors consider using it now. It is still required for desktop applications and clients of client/server applications that wish to be certified.
Dropped OnNow requirement for server apps. Relevant only for desktop applications.
Dropped the Active Directory requirement to support both NetBios and DNS names. Issue is enabling this functionality on downlevel platforms is extremely difficult.
Dropped the Migration chapter as this was for desktop applications.
Dropped the "Data and Settings Mgmt" chapter because this is desktop focused. Not relevant for server applications.
Dropped multi-monitor req,
Dropped the "don't rely on sound" accessibility requirement.
Clarified the Long file names requirement
Clarified the long printer names requirement. Win2000 support long printer names up to 220 characters.