Instances of DdeServerManager are used to manage multiple connections to DDE client applications. Each connection maintained by a DdeServerManager is represented by a DdeServer object. There are two primary techniques that applications can employ in using a DdeServerManager. With the first technique an application simply registers with the DdeServerManager the callbacks for one or more of the DDE server events (see Table 42) and directly handles the processing for those events. For example, an application can provide the code to handle a hotlink request from a DDE client.

Alternatively, a second technique can be used that relies entirely on internal default processing of the DdeServerManager and requires little involvement by the server application. To utilize this approach an application describes to a DdeServerManager a database of topics, along with the name of each data item within a topic, the format specification of each data item, and the current value of each data item. The DdeServerManager then handles all of the interaction with the DDE client. The only role of the server application is to update the DdeServerManager's database whenever a data item changes.

DdeServerManager has methods to add and remove DDE event callbacks, add and remove database items, and update items in the database.