Mission-Critical Applications*

Request for Info from IT Department

July 15, 2013

This is a request for Official FAQ/Information packet from IT Department, to Software Developers and Distributors/Resellers.

Not all categories enumerated here are applicable to all software products. To the extend they're applicable, this list represents mandatory declaration and disclosure, for the purpose of clients' adoption of your product, as well as to enable IT to support it.

Note: Large scale products already naturally (for their own benefit) have such comprehensive IT-specific communiqué readily available. Small developers are hereby well-advised to furnish a sensible abridged version.

*Mission-Critical Application (MCA): aka Line-Of-Business (LOB) Application, aka Vertical-Market Software (dated term of the 80s and 90s) - custom software, often industry-specific

• Firewall Passage Requirements
  • what out-bound initiated port(s) & protocol(s)
  • what in-bound, and specific justifications
  • full path of .exe files
• Administrator Rights
  • during installation/upgrade, and
  • daily operations
  • grant specific folder write/modify permissions to LUA
  • NOTICE:  It is fundamentally unacceptable for daily staff operations to be incompatible with LUA!  
• Update Mechanism
  • system-wide via installed Windows Service?
  • per-user account?
  • frequency & size
• Windows Services
  • your product depends on which one(s) (from Microsoft)
  • installed which one(s)
• Platform Prerequisites
  • OS version and SP level + Hotfixes
  • x64 support status
  • device driver compatibility
  • dotnet framework
  • Java (JVM)
  • other CLRs
  • backend servers
  • web browsers
• Data Files
  • officially validated backup scheme & assured restorability
  • any built-in archiving? "project/client"-level export/import?
  • server-side data locations
  • workstation-side storage
  • temp files (required? or can re-generate?)
  • record-/document-level locking
  • style
    • mass number of discrete documents/jobs files
    • monolithic database (internal divisions, pre-allocation, indexed, 1 touch--changes whole)
  • Volume Shadow Service (VSS) compatibility
  • Offline Folder compatibility
  • Branchcache compatibility
• Networking Scheme
  • 2-tier client-server architecture?
  • shared file, local processing
  • UNC support? \\hostname\sharename\folder\filename.exe
  • DOS style mapped drive mandatory?
  • Cross-OS-generation interoperability
• Virtualization
  • VM/VPC-specific technical provisions
  • EULA
• KnowledgeBase (KB)
  • URL?
  • login credentials required?