Letting users better manage their wireless and mobile computing environments will be a prime focus for new vendor products at this week's NetWorld+Interop 2004 Las Vegas show.

For example, Symbol Technologies will unveil a wireless LAN (WLAN) management product - the Symbol Mobility Services Suite (MSS) - which is a set of management programs designed to work together, with a Web-based GUI.

The package includes Symbol's existing WLAN management products, such as AirBeam Manager, but adds a battery of new features, a new GUI and a unique package: The software comes loaded on a rack-mounted IBM eServer. Also new are bits of code, called agents, which run on the wireless clients, access points and switches to be managed.

The Web GUI, accessible via any Web browser, ties the programs together, and lets administrators visually sort the WLAN elements, including users, by groups, locations, user classes, applications and other criteria. Using the Web screens, administrators reconfigure devices, update their software, and monitor and analyze radio signals.

Using the Web screen's tabs, for example, an administrator can see the status of the access points at a given location or the software version of an inventory control application on all wireless handhelds issued to warehouse staffers.

The agents are a vital part of the new management product. They monitor a range of functions on devices. When the agents find an anomaly or specific change, they send an alert back to the MSS management console. An SNMP trap can pass these alerts back to an enterprise management system such as Computer Associates Unicenter or HP Openview.

The agents also make it possible to monitor the results of scheduled software installations, such as a new application version or a patch.

Future releases of Symbol's WLAN switches, thin access points and PocketPC-based handhelds will ship with the agents already loaded. For now, customers can add the software to WLAN devices like any other software update, says Gary Kovacs, Symbol's senior director of product management.

Version 2.0 of MSS, due out later this year, will have additional agents, some from partners, for a growing range of other client devices, and access points typically found in enterprise wireless deployments, such as older DOS-based bar code scanners and PalmOS PDAs.