1.4 Relationship to Other Protocols

This protocol depends on the Group Policy: Core Protocol (as specified in [MS-GPOL]) to provide a list of applicable GPOs. It also transmits Group Policy settings and instructions between the client and the Group Policy server by reading and writing files using remote file access.

See [MS-WPO] section 6.4 for an overview of remote file system concepts.

The administrative tool and client plug-ins for this protocol use LDAP version 3 (as specified in [RFC2251]) to read and write protocol-specific data.

Group Policy: Software Installation Protocol Extension relationship diagram

Figure 1: Group Policy: Software Installation Protocol Extension relationship diagram

The Group Policy Protocol invokes plug-ins for protocols such as this one. In summary, this extension's CSE GUID and tool extension GUIDs (as specified in section 1.9) are stored within a GPO by the policy administration portion of the Group Policy Protocol whenever the Group Policy: Software Installation Protocol Extension causes a GPO to contain policy settings for the policy targets. During policy application by a client, the Group Policy Protocol retrieves the CSE GUID from the GPO, signaling to the client to invoke the Group Policy: Software Installation Protocol Extension plug-in to retrieve Group Policy: Software Installation Protocol Extension settings from the GPO. Similarly, the tool extension GUIDs are used by policy administration tools to invoke the policy administration portion of the Group Policy: Software Installation Protocol Extension plug-ins in order to update the Group Policy: Software Installation Protocol Extension settings stored within a GPO.