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Application Installation Conflicts

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One reason why the RSOP_ApplicationManagementPolicySetting class is more complex than other WMI RSoP classes is because these types of policy settings can conflict with each other in more ways than other policy settings.

The following are ways in which software installation policies can differ from other types of policies:

  • One application management policy setting can conflict with another application management policy setting that has the same product identifier.
  • One application management policy setting can conflict with other application management policy settings because of upgrade relationships, language-matching, and software product conflicts.
  • When applying application management policies, the system considers multiple factors including the local machine state, and the relationship of a deployed application to other deployed applications and to policy settings.

Therefore, the reason why a policy is applied or not applied can be a complex one; the reason is not simply because an administrator applied the policy.

As with the other WMI RSoP classes, policy settings that conflict with each other have the same id property; for application management, this has the following results:

  • A "winning" application, that is, an application that has a precedence property equal to 1 (and was therefore applied to a target), can appear only once in the set of applications with the same EntryType property.
  • A "losing" application, that is, an application that was not applied to a target, can appear more than once in the set of applications with the same EntryType property, once for each "winning" application with which it conflicts.
  • If a "losing" application appears more than once in the set of applications with the same EntryType property, none of these instances can have the same id and precedence properties.
  • An application can appear only once in the set of applications with the same id and EntryType properties.

For more information about why one application is installed rather than another, see the following topics: