Hi Sylvain,

My experience with MTS has been mostly positive, once I learned to handle the security aspects. Having said that, I have to tell you that my environment here is almost 100% NT Workstation/NT Server - I haven't worked in a highly mixed environment like you are facing.

My advise, for whatever its worth, would be to build a simple test application using Option 4 and see what problems pop up. You can always drop back to Option 2 if necessary. I'd use Option 1 if I were really mad at my employer and planned to leave immediately after implementation :>). I can't really comment on Option 3 since I jumped from Option 2 to Option 4.

You don't have to install MTS on the workstations, only on the server. MTS generates a setup executable to run on the client for registration.

Best of luck.


>I need to decide what technology to use and I would like some suggestions.
>
>I have a COM object to distribute to many clients. The clients have different configuration:
>- Single user, Win 9x
>- Single user, Win NT
>- Multiusers, Win 9x peer-to-peer
>- Multiusers, Win 9x workstations, Win NT server
>- Multiusers, Win 9x workstations, Novell server
>- Multiusers, Win NT workstations peer-to-peer
>- Multiusers, Win NT workstations, Win NT server
>
>My object will use a database of 200MB approx. This database is read-only.
>
>The installation should be easy for the client and the maintenance of the COM object and the database should be easy too.
>
>I am toying with the following ideas:
>1) COM object and database installed on each workstation.
>Pro: easy to install and configure
>Con: hard to maintain, take out lot of space on each workstation
>2) COM object installed on the workstation and the database on the server.
>Pro: easy to install, take less space on the workstations
>Con: COM still hard to maintain, need some way to configure the path to the database on each of the workstations
>3) COM object and database installed on the server (DCOM)
>Pro: easy to maintain, take take less space on the workstations
>Con: hard to configure, object need to be intalled on a Win NT station (not sure), need to detect and install DCOM if missing
>4) COM object and database installed on the server (DCOM) using MTS
>Pro: easy to maintain, take take less space on the workstations
>Con: hard to configure, object need to be intalled on a Win NT station (not sure), need to detect and install DCOM if missing, need to distribute the MTS package, need to detect and install MTS if missing (???)
>
>What do you think?