Compaq OSI/FTAM D43, OSI/APLMGR D43 manual Conformance and Interoperatility, Interoperability

2 Conformance and Interoperatility

This section presents information about the conformance to standards and the interoperability of the Compaq FTAM responder.

Conformance is the satisfaction of the requirements of the applicable standards, consistent with the capabilities stated in the protocol implementation conformance statement (PICS) for the implementation. Interoperability is the ability of an implementation of a standard to work with other implementations of the same standard to deliver services.

A list of the supported standards and agreements that apply to Compaq FTAM is provided in “About This Manual” at the beginning of this manual.

Conformance

To be ISO FTAM-conformant, an FTAM implementation must comply with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) FTAM standard for communication between different FTAM implementations. Conformance to the ISO FTAM standard is tested in the areas of the support of services, functional units, service classes, and file attributes.

Conformance testing increases the probability that an implementation is able to interwork with other implementations. Two or more implementations are more likely to work together if they conform to the same set of standards.

The Compaq OSI/FTAM product has been tested to conform with ISO 8571, NIST Special Publication 500-162 (Stable Implementation Agreements for Open Systems Interconnection Protocols) Part 9—FTAM Phase 2, and US GOSIP version 1.0.

Interoperability

The interoperability, or interworking, of two FTAM implementations is the ability of these implementations to communicate using FTAM primitives in a useful and meaningful way. While conformance to ISO FTAM is necessary, it does not by itself guarantee that two implementations will interwork. Even if the two implementations conform to the same OSI protocol standard, they may be incapable of interworking with each other for reasons outside the scope of that standard (see ISO IS 9646-1, section 5.7.2). In addition, the FTAM standard is very complex. Two implementations may contain disjoint subsets of the standard that do not allow for interoperability but are fully conformant to the ISO specification. For example, two systems cannot interoperate if each supports only an initiator, or if a document type supported by an initiator is not included among the document types supported by the responder.

The Compaq FTAM product has been tested to conform with the standards and profiles mentioned in the above subsection, “Conformance.” It has also been tested to interoperate with a number of other vendors according to the NISTIR 4435 document, “FTAM Interoperability Tests,” which most vendors use as a basis for writing FTAM interoperability tests.

OSI/FTAM Responder Manual—425199-001

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