Hi

We are considering implementing some 3 party applicatons
that will extend out schema. What's to stop an application
vendor from extending the Schema and/or using objects
which conflict with another AD aware application. I guess
the two scenarios are
1. Someone adds to the schema
2. Two vendors use an existing object/attribute for
different purposes.

1. Does Microsoft actually police this to an extent
2. Do they have a certification program....like they do
when a hardware vendor wants their servers to be used for
MS clustering for example... ?

Any good answers?

kmex

It's a pretty grey area. It is best practise for 3rd
party vendors to supply LDIF files for their schema
changes, rather than simply an EXE. This provides you
with both a readable and self-documenting system for
schema changes, as well as a simple method for testing in
your lab.

I have seen a few products that extend the schema and most
vendors handle it quite well, i.e. they introduce new
Object Classes and attributes rather than changing
existing ones. In other words, for a product called MyFax
they might prefix any object classes and attribues with MF.

They should also properly register the OIDs that they use,
which helps with keeping the chances of conflicts down.

AFAIK Microsoft doesn't police the extensions in any way.
They do have some certification programs for 3rd party
products, but I'm not sure how closely they look at the
schema extensions. It's generally a case of "buyer
beware" and lots of testing.

I've found VMWare to be really good when testing schema
extensions. The snapshot utility allows you to easily
revert to a previous configuration after you've applied
the schema change, so you can try it in different
combinations as many times as you want.

Tony