The Workforce Central 5.x Application of Kronos is deployed on thousands of client machines at their customer environment. The application loads in the client desktops as an applet. In the past Kronos relied on the static versioning to load a specific verson of the JRE to run their applets. The changes we introduced in this area broke their application. A workaround was suggested to them to use the Family ClassID instead. This works technically but in their customer environments, where multiple applications tested on different versionf of JRE ( 5.0.XX & 1.4.xx ) needs to co-exist, this is creating warnings each time their applet loads virtually rendering customer applications unusable due to usablity issues.

The scenario when the warning appears is as follows ( ISV uses family class id) :

 Customer A has product A that requires JRE 1.4.2_12, this has been installed for a while and users see no reason to upgrade - the IT department manages 1000s of client PCs and lock down their client PCs. Along comes product B. They require JDK 1.5.0, and their software assists users in installation by supplying a JVM. The version they supply is 1.5.0_11, and 1.5.0_11 has a security baseline for 1.4.2 of 1.4.2_13. Now that all client PCs have got 1.5.0_11 installed, users want to use product A. The very next time they use product A, and until they upgrade to 1.4.2_13, each time an applet is invoked the user will get a warning message.

Requested fix:
 Modify the JRE installer so if it detects older JRE families on the system, it asks the users if they want to download and upgrade these JREs in the older families to meet the new security baseline. This solution will prevent these annoying warning messages that breaks existing customer products.