Using the CMAK wizard, you can develop multiple service profiles to support a wide variety of connection requirements. The number of options available can make it seem difficult to determine what you need to include in your service profile to best support your needs. This section provides an overview of how to develop service profiles to support two of the most common scenarios:
These scenarios show the differences between two very different types of enterprises and how to customize a Connection Manager service profile to support their requirements. These are only two possible scenarios. You should review these two scenarios and review the Phase 1 information in the CMAK Guide to decide which options are best for your service.
You can make a copy of the planning worksheet and mark it up as you go through the scenarios to clarify how the options are defined. The worksheet is designed to match the structure of the CMAK wizard, so it is a good way to document the information required when running the wizard.
Important The following information provides an overview of methods of structuring Connection Manager service profiles to support the most common scenarios. This information is not sufficient to enable you to build service profiles. The details required to develop custom elements for a service profile and the rules for specifying each option are covered in the CMAK Guide. You should print the CMAK Guide and use it to determine how to set up your service profile. You can access the CMAK Guide by clicking Help from any page of the CMAK wizard.
If you are an ISP that provides local access and participates in a consortium that enables your users to access the Internet from remote locations, you can create service profiles that contain multiple phone books - one for your local service and one or more for other access points provided by other members of the consortium. Merging multiple phone books into your service profile enables more effective phone-book maintenance than would be possible if all access numbers were maintained in a single phone book.
The CMAK Guide provides information about how to merge service profiles by using the CMAK wizard. The following information provides insight on how you can use merged phone books to effectively support an ISP account.
Before running the CMAK wizard to create your service profile, create one or more phone books. For example, you could create a separate phone book for each ISP in the consortium to maintain on its own. To simplify the scenario, this example uses only two phone books (one for the local service and one for all of the other ISP access numbers supported by the consortium).
The phone books that you create contain all of the phone numbers that can be used to access the Internet. Each phone number in a phone book is known as a Point of Presence (POP). Microsoft Connection Point Services (available in the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack) provides a Phone Book Administrator tool that simplifies the creation and maintenance of phone books in the format required by Connection Manager. Connection Point Services also includes Phone Book Service software that can be used to maintain the phone book and automatically update users' phone books when they connect to your service. For more information about creating the phone book, see Connection Point Services Help; also see the topics "Providing phone book support" and "Merging phone books and other features from existing service profiles" in Phase 2, "Developing custom elements," of the CMAK Guide.
For this example, create two phone books, one that contains the POPs for local access to your service and one that contains POPs for all fifty states in the United States. Because the POPs in the second phone book are provided by various remote ISPs, each with their own configuration requirements, each POP can have its own configuration settings. To specify the way in which a POP is handled, label the POP in the phone book with a specific Dial-Up Networking entry. In Step 2 (following), when you use the CMAK wizard to create the service profile, you specify how each Dial-Up Networking entry is handled. Before creating the service profile, determine how each POP is handled:
Each phone book (.pbk) file that you create must have a region file (.pbr) with the same file name. For example, the two phone books in this example might have the names LocalISP.pbk and RemISP.pbk, so the region files are named LocalISP.pbr and RemISP.pbr.
To merge multiple phone books, you must create one service profile for each phone book. For example, using the two-phone-book example, you would create a service profile for the remote ISPs by entering the following information:
You can specify other options when running the CMAK wizard to create this service profile, but only the options listed previously are used when a service profile is merged with another service profile.
After you create the service profile that you want to merge, create the primary service profile, which is known as the referencing service profile. In this profile, specify the following information:
After you have completed step 3, thoroughly test your service profiles to ensure that they work as you expect. The Connection Manager service profile that you create can be incorporated in an installation package that is created by using the Internet Explorer Customization wizard. You also can distribute the service profile individually on a disk or use a Web server to download it to your users. For information about configuring profiles from your sign-up server, see "Using the Internet Connection Wizard for Sign-up and Setup" later in this chapter.
You can create Connection Manager service profiles that provide corporate access to users by using either private dial-up connections to your corporate LAN or by using VPN connections that tunnel through a public network (such as the Internet). If you want to use ISPs to access your corporate account, it is recommended that you specify support for VPN connections to secure the data that you send over the Internet. Although you could set up corporate access without VPN support and use only a single service profile (a single phone book), for this example, assume that the service profile will support VPN connections and that you need two service profiles: one containing the phone book for your private corporate numbers and one containing the ISP phone book.
Similar to the first scenario, create the phone books before creating the service profiles. In this example, create the phone book and region files for the corporate numbers (such as Corp.pbk and Corp.pbr) and the phone book and region files for the ISPs (such as Isp.pbk and Isp.pbr). Determine the requirements for Dial-Up Networking entries for the POPs in both Corp.pbk and Isp.pbk. (For more information about Dial-Up Networking Entries, see step 1 of "Providing Access to an Internet Service Provider," earlier in this chapter.)
When corporate numbers and ISP numbers are both included (by merging service profiles), the users get a single view of the network. If you prefer that some phone numbers for a geographic area are used only as emergency or secondary-access numbers, you can use the Surcharge option in Phone Book Administrator to distinguish them from numbers to be used for routine access.
To support VPN connections, you must set up a VPN server at the egress point from the Internet to your private network. For more information about setting up a VPN server, visit the Microsoft Windows NT Server Communication Services Web site.
Similar to the first scenario, create the merged service profile before creating the referencing service profile. In this example, create a service profile to provide corporate access through ISPs by entering the following information:
Other options specified in this service profile will be ignored when it is merged into another service profile.
After you have created the service profile that you want to merge, you can create the primary service profile, which is known as the referencing service profile. In this profile, specify the following information:
After you have completed step 4, thoroughly test your service profiles on all supported platforms to ensure that they work as you expect. You can then distribute the service profiles to corporate users by posting them to a file or to Web servers.
