After his Dynamic Systems Initiative update talk, I talked with Ed Anderson on his way to man the "kissing booth" (Q & A), the affable director of strategic marketing for Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative. He seemed to have a good grasp of the low-level stuff I've been hunting around for, esp. some clarification on WS-Management.
As
I said yesterday, the key to successful systems management protocol is ubiquity: the more silos, devices, platforms, and applications that a protocol can interact with, the better. I raised the concern that WS-Management would be available only in Vista, and suggested that the best bet for it's over-all success would be backporting it to XP, 2000, and other Windows versions. The thinking being that people don't upgrade as rapidly as you might want, so WS-Management would be waiting for Vista to become the primary Windows deployment.
Well, long story short, Ed said that there were plans to backport WS-Management to past Windows versions. Not Win95, he joked, but the other major versions. There wasn't a definite timeline or release strategy, but the fact that they're thinking and planning on it is encouraging for WS-Management.
Now, as I said previously, I just need to dig deeper into WS-Management and see how well it would technically be at providing a standardized systems management protocol. Comparing it to CIM and WSDM would, of course, be excellent as well.
Disclaimer: Microsoft and IBM (who're the WSDM folks) are a client.
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