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Happy Birthday DMTF!

By Dave Kearns
Network World Windows Networking Newsletter, 05/15/02

A belated " Happy Birthday! " to the Distributed Management Task Force which celebrated its 10th anniversary late last month.

Originally founded as the Desktop Management Task Force, the name changed a few years ago when the organization's mission changed to leading " the development of management standards for distributed desktop, network, enterprise and Internet environments. "

Microsoft has been involved with the DMTF since its founding as the group's purpose was to create a standardized way to report the software and hardware in a DOS- and/or Windows-based workstation (10 years ago, the days of Windows 3.1, workstations had to have DOS if they ran Windows).

The problem was that networking hardware (servers, routers, hubs and switches) were manageable (as manageable as any hardware in 1992) through SNMP - but nothing had been done to implement SNMP for Wintel-based computers, it was mostly Unix hosts and midrange servers that were involved.

Out of that pioneering work came the Common Information Model (CIM) we have today, which DMTF describes as " a conceptual information model for describing management that is not bound to a particular implementation. " This means that it should be possible to build structures using management data from a variety of sources and different management systems, such as Compaq's Insite Manager, Dell's IT Assistant, Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, Microsoft's SMS, Novell's ManageWise, and Tivoli's Management Software, etc. This management data could be collected, stored and analyzed using the common format - CIM - while also allowing proprietary extensions as a way of differentiating the offerings.

CIM hasn't replaced SNMP, they've become very complementary. And DMTF hasn't limited itself to CIM, either. For example, DMTF took over maintenance of the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI; formerly WBEM) and WMI extensions for Windows Driver Model (WDM) from Microsoft in 1998. At the same time, Microsoft and its partners (BMC Software, Cisco, Compaq and Intel) turned over development of the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative to the DMTF where it's been integrated with CIM while maintaining its separate identity.

The other major acquisition for DMTF was the Directory Enabled Networks initiative, also begun by Microsoft and Cisco, which has led to better management of Windows-based networks over the past couple of years.

The DMTF is an organization that's very important to Windows networking - without it, our jobs as network executives would be a great deal harder. To steal a line from another company's advertising campaign, the DMTF doesn't make the products you use, it makes the products you use better. Happy Birthday DMTF!