The Common Engineering Criteria are constantly evolving
To keep pace with innovation and the growing needs of today's mobile and collaborative workforce, the Common Engineering Criteria (CEC) are updated each year. Our goal is to exceed your expectations for security, reliability, total cost of ownership, integration and business value consistently across our infrastructure server products.
(These criteria are in addition to the previous year's criteria.)
New Health Model to improve Troubleshooting
IT often have to perform an "information treasure hunt" when presented with events and trying to troubleshoot them. The documentation of events is often inconsistent between product documentation, the Windows Event Viewer, and documents on the Web.
To solve this problem, all server products must create and maintain a health model based on the standard Service Modeling Language (SML) including relevant operational events and performance counters, in addition to identifying potential failures and define diagnose and recovery information.
Improved Management Pack(s)
The new version of the Management Pack specification released as part of System Center Operations Manager 2007 offers significant improvement in system monitoring, availability, and health through centralized and proactive management. In order to ensure that IT can continue to support existing products in addition to implementing new products by taking advantage of the new Health Model and Management Packs, all server products will continue to also ship Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Management Packs.
Rights Management
Products that transmit, store or e-mail Office 2003 and above document formats must support Active Directory Rights Management Services (RMS) in order to protect digital assets. RMS is information protection technology that works with RMS-enabled applications to help safeguard digital information from unauthorized use. It provides persistent information protection and policy enforcement that stays with the content no matter where it goes or how it gets there.
Workflow
All server products implementing workflow must use Windows Workflow Foundation engine and model for workflow features. For more information on Windows Workflow Foundation check http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663322.aspx.
Hot Add Memory/CPU
All enterprise editions of Microsoft server products which exploit the number of CPUs and/or memory must ensure that they behave properly when memory or CPUs are added when the system is running.
Safe for Image-based Deployment
With the increased emphasis on virtualization, Microsoft server products must be safe for imaging and deployment. Server products must not store "state" attributes that will impede image-based deployment such as machine-specific state, AD information, Windows SID or Windows machine names locally or in a private store.
Improved, Smarter Setup
Typically, customers have to go through a multiple step process to install our products, starting with the install CD and then finding and installing updates. To reduce or completely remove the "Window of Vulnerability" Microsoft Update (MU) opt-in should be provided as part of the install.
The goal is to reduce or completely remove the requirement for a reboot during install or update (via Microsoft Update (MU)) – Note: Customers have to Opt-In for MU to work.
Localization Engineering
Microsoft enforces set of engineering best practices to enable additional language localization enabling additional localization even after product shipped. The English version of a server product must run unchanged in every locale and support every character set.
Multi-Lingual Interface (MUI) must be supported and architected such that additional languages can be added after the initial release.
Certified for Longhorn Server
Longhorn Server Logo Program is a set of requirements that tests the quality of an application/solution that runs on Windows Server. Microsoft server products must be capable of passing the "Certified" level of the Longhorn logo program. For additional details on the Certified for Windows Server, check the Web site.
Windows Server virtualization Support
Each server product must be capable of running within a Virtual Machine (VM) as provided by Windows Server virtualization on Windows Server “Longhorn”. Each server product must handle escalation and support running in a VM at the same level as was the product running directly on Windows Server.
Best Practices Analyzer
Best Practices Analyzers (BPA’s) must be implemented used the industry standard Service Modeling Language (SML). For more information on SML, see the Web site.
Improved Feedback Platform
Using Microsoft Connect products must allow customers to rate the quality of the content and provide suggestions to improve our products. Products will enable customers to join product-related user communities from their management user interface. For more information on Microsoft Connect see http://connect.microsoft.com.
