Frequently Asked Questions

What is APOC?

APOC stands for A Point Of Control. It provides a framework for centralized storage of application and desktop configuration which may be applied to users, organizations and hosts.

What is it used for?

It is used to reduce the administration overhead for large desktop deployments by supporting centralized management and availability of key configuration settings for the desktop and its applications.

How does it work?

APOC has three main components.

• A web application called the Desktop Manager allows the administrator to create and assign configuration profiles in a central repository.
• The Desktop Agent is a daemon is responsible for retrieving these profiles and their assignments, and keeping them up to date in a local database on the application host.
• For each supported desktop application, an APOC adapter is responsible for retrieving relevant APOC configuration data and merging it with the application configuration.

What is a profile?

Configuration profiles define logically releated sets of configuration for supported applications. Profiles can be assigned to organizations, domains, hosts, and users. A profile provides a default value for a configuration setting or enforces a value for a configuration key.

What is an adapter?

Each of the supported desktop applications uses its own configuration adapter to query the Desktop Agent for its configuration data. The adapters must be installed on every client that you want to manage centrally.

How does APOC store configuration?

A master copy of all APOC configuration data is stored and maintained by the Desktop Manager in a centralized configuration data store (LDAP or file based). On each desktop machine, the APOC agent maintains a cache of needed configuration data for use by desktop applications. In both cases, the APOC SPI is used to do the actual storage and retrieval of configuration data. APOC supports the LDAPv3 protocol, the LDAP servers currently tested are:

• Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition
• OpenLDAP
• iPlanet Directory Server
• Fedora Directory Server
• Microsoft Active Directory

Which applications work with APOC?

• Any application using GConf to access its configuration. This includes a large subset of GNOME applications.
• Java applications using the Java Preferences API
• Firefox Other application adapters (such as for ?OpenOffice.org) might be released in the future.

In which language is it developed?

It is mostly developed in Java. However the adapters are developed in the main language of each application (C for the GConf adapter, C++ for Firefox).

Which operating systems are supported by APOC?

APOC has been tested on:

• Solaris10 and 11/06 (both SPARC and x86).
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 at the Service Pack 3 level or later.
• ?RedHat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server (RHEL AS) 4 Update 3.