I find it interesting that the description of the Mult-user feature sounds like MakeMusic may have gotten it WRONG.
Vista/Win7 have a major departure for where application-specific data (as opposed to user-specific data) is to be stored. To understand that, you have to distinguish 3 types of files: 1. application files -- not data, are read-only. Same data used by everyone. 2. application configuration files -- data, but for storing data that the app uses when it runs. Needs to be stored per user, since different users have different app configurations. Read/write for the user. 3. user data files -- data that belongs to a user, and is the data files for the application. Read/write for the user. Before Vista/Win7, #1 was stored in C:\Program Files and the other two were stored in the user profile. Under the user profile there were two filders, Application Data and Local Settings, the purpose of which were not always clear, and that were used differently by different application developers. To further confuse things, under Local Settings, there's an Application Data folder. These folders were actually original an effort to separate out different kinds of data used by the applications, but the guidelines for it were never quite clear, and a lot of developers got this wrong. Add to this the fact that way too many standalone Windows users were running in an administrative logon, and it was possible to get away with putting all the read/write data in the application folder (by default, C:\Program Files), which for regular user-level logons is read-only (and has been since Windows 2000, released in 1999). In fact, major software suppliers like Intuit have been writing their flagship applications based on the assumption of write access to C:\Program Files such that any user trying to run with user-level permissions only will have problems (QuickBooks requires at least Power User permissions, for instance). Vista changed that with User Access Control (UAC). UAC works kind of like most other OS's by running all apps by default with a user-level security token, and asking the user for permission when the app wants to do something that requires more than user-level permission. Vista's implementation of UAC was very "noisy," i.e., it asked for way too many approvals and caused many people to turn it off (so you'd be running with a security token that was equivalent to the highest-level security group the user logon was a member of). Win7 has fixed most of that by being much more sensible about what it prompts about. Now, in addition to UAC, MS revised the permissions on the application data folders under the user profile. Before Vista, those folders were all read/write for users (since they were in the user's profile), but with Vista, this was changed so that AppData was read- only for users. Vista/Win7 added another wrinkle by reorganizing data. To quote MS's documentation (http://tinyurl.com/yccs3c => http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/b/a/3ba6d659-6e39-4cd7-b3a2- 9c96482f5353/Managing%20Roaming%20User%20Data%20Deployment%20Guide.doc ): Windows Vista also has changed the Application Data folder structure. Previous user profiles did not logically sort data stored in the Application Data folder, making it difficult to distinguish data that belonged to the machine from data belonging to the user. Windows Vista addresses this issue by creating a single AppData folder under the user profile. The AppData folder contains three subfolders: Roaming, Local, and LocalLow. Windows uses the Local and LocalLow folders for application data that does not roam with the user. Usually this data is either machine specific or too large to roam. The AppData\Local folder in Windows Vista is the same as the Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data folder in Windows XP. Windows uses the Roaming folder for application specific data, such as custom dictionaries, which are machine independent and should roam with the user profile. The AppData\Roaming folder in Windows Vista is the same as the Documents and Settings\username\Application Data folder in Windows XP. (this explanation also clarifies the distinction between \Application Data\ and \Local Settings\Application Data\) Thus, the fact that Jari reports that Finale has been changed to store Finale-specific settings in \Application Data\MakeMusic\ shows that either Jari is mistaken, or that MakeMusic has not fully absorbed the implications of Vista/Win7. Of course, it could be that what Jari reports is just shorthand, and that's the location for the data on WinXP and earlier, and it's stored in the appropriate location on Vista/Win7, but I worry that there's no apparent distinction between the two types of application-specific data (i.e., specific to computer vs. specific to user). This may be because Finale is not used too much in a domain environment where users have roaming profiles, but it worries me that MM may still be just barely adapting to security structures introduced 11 years, as opposed to the security model used by Vista/Win7. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
