LAS VEGAS - Microsoft Tuesday unveiled a multiyear, multistage plan for the construction of a management platform intended to provide corporate customers with the tools needed to make Windows-based servers and applications a reliable piece of their datacenter computing environments.

Management has been a historic weak spot for Microsoft, often becoming an issue only after systems and applications are deployed.

But the company is attacking that reality with its broadest effort to date called Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which will incorporate a number of technologies and products, including development tools and the operating system, to create a self-managing computing environment covering everything from applications to servers. Microsoft's competitors, including IBM, Sun and HP are working on similar initiatives generically referred to as autonomic computing.

As could be expected, Microsoft is taking a Windows-centric management view and will rely on third-party partners to connect Microsoft's management tools into heterogeneous environments.

"Increasingly people want the one-stop shopping approach and less baling wire and duct tape," says Dana Gardner, an analyst with the Yankee Group. "This initiative sounds comprehensive for Microsoft systems but heterogeneity is the rule in large enterprises. If large enterprises have to go to third parties to get that they may just choose a broader set of management tools from the start."

Under the DSI umbrella, Microsoft has created what it calls its System Definition Model (SDM), an XML-based technology that will be built into the operating system and used in the development of applications so management becomes an inherent part of the entire Windows environment.

Microsoft plans to start building SDM support into Visual Studio.Net later this year, but support in the operating system and management tools won't come until the Windows Longhorn timeframe, which has slipped to late 2004. Microsoft says the entire management platform will be finalized with the Blackcomb release of Windows, which has slipped out to 2006 or beyond.

Microsoft also said it will combine its Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), an event and performance monitoring tool, and Systems Management Server (SMS) into a single product called System Center, which will provide tools to manage desktops, laptops, PDAs, applications and servers. It also will deliver tools for change and configuration management, asset management, application management, IT process orchestration, performance trending, reporting and capacity planning.