Managing Shims in the Enterprise: Practical Advice for Application Compatibility Mitigation

When addressing application compatibility issues in preparation for a deployment of Windows Vista, among the most flexible and powerful tools available are application compatibility fixes, or shims. However, most organizations do not leverage shims to the extent that they could, either because they don't understand the underlying technology or because they do not have a process in place to manage shims over the lifetime of the applications they manage. In this white paper the author shares his experience and best practices working with large enterprise customers to address application compatibility issues using shims as well as how to manage an organization's custom shim databases.