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How the ACT Community Works

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Applies To: Windows 7, Windows Vista

The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) Community uses the Microsoft® Compatibility Exchange to share your compatibility assessment with all registered ACT Community members.

Regardless of your ACT Community membership, you can log your issues and solutions by using the Analyze screen of the Application Compatibility Manager. However, when you access the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange as a registered ACT Community member, you can upload your compatibility data to the community and download other ACT Community member issues.

This topic includes:

  • ACT Community assessment ratings

  • ACT Community process

  • Microsoft Compatibility Exchange workflow

ACT Community Assessment Ratings

The ACT community can rate the compatibility of an application. Ratings are displayed graphically (changing from red to yellow to green) in the Community Assessment column. To understand what the rating color means, you must first understand how the underlying community rating works. There are three available scores, based on the rating for an application.

  • Works. If you vote that an application works, it is denoted as five green bars.

  • Works with minor issues or has solutions. If you vote that an application has minor issues, it is denoted as three light green bars.

  • Does not work. If you vote that an application does not work, it is denoted as a single red bar.

The ACT then takes your information and combines it with all of the information provided by the other ACT Community users and averages the ratings to show a color gradient from one to five bars.

Note

Although it is not shown in this image, the assessment rating scale works the same way based on your vote for an application running on a 64-bit operating system.

ACT Community Process

The following diagram shows the ACT Community process.

Microsoft Compatibility Exchange Workflow

The Microsoft Compatibility Exchange workflow is as follows for the ACT Community data:

  1. On the Analyze screen of the Application Compatibility Manager, click Send and Receive Data.

  2. The Application Compatibility Toolkit client contacts your local ACT database to get data and then calls the ACT Web service to get data from the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange.

  3. You consent to synchronize your application assessment data with the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange and the ACT Community.

Important

You have the option to exclude any applications from being shared with the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange. However, you will not get application assessment data from other community users for excluded applications.

  1. The data synchronization process begins, and a status bar appears.

    Synchronization includes:

    • Sending your application data to the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange

    • Downloading the community data from the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange

  2. During the synchronization process, the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange matches your application data against the application profile database. . Only the changes between your data and the Microsoft Compatibility Exchange are synchronized.

See Also

Concepts

Selecting Your Send and Receive Status
Sending and Receiving Compatibility Data
ACT Community Technical Reference
Microsoft Compatibility Exchange Technical Reference