Mapping Solutions onto the Parental Controls Infrastructure

Five categories of common ISV and ISP/portal parental-controls aware offerings are readily apparent:

• Standalone client application. Examples are email clients and media players. Although media players have Internet-facing risk and some have specific services, Windows Parental Controls primarily promotes logging and restrictions on playback activities only to minimize library impacts and logging noise to administrators.
• Client/server solutions. The most prominent examples are instant messaging solutions.
• ISP suites. These are collections of client/server solutions and client applications, often integrated in a single client user interface. Note that most of these also provide most or all functionality by using browser access, crossing over into web-only solutions.
• Web-only solutions. Accessed through browser. Examples are web-based email and instant messaging functionality. Access to these may be blocked by appropriately populated web filter categories.
• Firewall-like solutions. Provides filtering at the network stack level, and potentially other operating system restrictions.

Recommendations for implementing compliant solutions for each category are specified in the following table.

Category	Logging	Restrictions settings	Restrictions enforcement	Web Content Filter replacement	Use of extensibility link for logging and settings access
"Stand-alone" client	Required on client	Required on client	Required on client	N/A	Required, will be exe. May simply invoke app UI navigation
Client/server solution	Required on client if not performed by server	Required on client if not performed by server	Required on client if not performed by server	N/A	Required, will be exe
ISP suite	Required on client if not performed by server	Required on client if not performed by server	Required on client if not performed by server	Recommend using WPC filter, but allow replacement if robust for multi-user	Required, will be exe
Web-only solution	Recommend performing on server	Recommend performing on server	Recommend performing on server	N/A	Recommended. Expose server logging and settings by using exe
Firewall-like solutions	Required on client	Required on client	Required on client	Recommend using WPC filter, but allow replacement if robust for multi-user	Required, will be exe