Common Engineering Criteria Updated for 2007

The Common Engineering Criteria (CEC), which encourages common design, documentation, and licensing goals for Microsoft’s server products, were updated in June 2006 to cover products that will be released in the 2007 product year (July 2006 through June 2007). Microsoft promotes the CEC as a serious engineering-driven program designed to improve the interoperability and lower the cost of deploying and maintaining Microsoft’s server products, but the way it publishes the criteria and the number of exemptions granted in the past may have given the program an unfortunate marketing rather than engineering slant.

Common Engineering Roadmap and Criteria

The CEC are the result of a development and evaluation process designed to reduce the total cost of ownership of Microsoft server products and ensure that the products operate well with one another. The criteria include a mechanism for publishing the progress that each product group is making toward meeting the criteria, but this information is sometimes unclear about which server products fall under the CEC, how stringent the criteria are, and how easy it is for a product to gain an exemption for any given criteria.