The purpose of the manageability initiatives described in this guide is to help plan, deploy, proactively maintain, and centrally control a distributed computing environment in order to reduce the overall cost of owning and managing computers. To do this, management technology must bring together information from different technology disciplines to provide services oriented toward management functions, which can in turn decrease TCO.
To succeed in significantly reducing TCO, management solutions must adapt to the needs and tasks of the environment to be managed. The solutions must therefore be open, flexible, and extensible: They need to support new technologies and integrate management functions supplied by more than one vendor. Such systems must conform to appropriate existing standards and have sufficient flexibility to extend support to emerging standards and technologies.
Providing management solutions requires establishing a management infrastructure in the operating system, exposing this infrastructure, and then building the tools to use it. This includes:
For hardware platform designers, the technology used for platform instrumentation is of direct interest because it is a design element for their systems. Some 1997 PC platforms were instrumented with the Desktop Management Interface (DMI), as described in the Network PC System Design Guidelines (attached as Appendix E in the References part of this guide).
In the PC 98 time frame, a new Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) component becomes a requirement when it is implemented in the Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0 operating systems.
A related initiative, the Network PC (Net PC) design initiative, defines the reference design for the Net PC, a new member of the PC family that uses Intel Architecture or other microprocessor architectures and that runs the Windows 98 or Windows NT Workstation operating systems.
The Net PC is designed to reduce the cost of business computing by optimizing the design for users who do not require the flexibility and expandability of the traditional PC, and by allowing organizations to centrally manage their information technology. Although the types of business users will vary, the Net PC will be ideally suited for those involved in activities such as data entry, transaction processing, and intranet and Internet access.
The current version of the defining specification, Network PC System Design Guidelines, can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/netpc.htm and http://developer.intel.com. Version 1.0b is included as Appendix E in the References part of this guide.
There are several high-level design goals for Net PC, including:
Because the Net PC is a catalyst for improving TCO across all platforms, these guidelines are referred to in the PC 98 requirements as background information for Office PC 98. The following summarizes key Net PC design requirements:
Notice that references to the Net PC requirements are made in this guide only to provide a context for certain Office PC 98 requirements. The actual Net PC requirements are defined in Network PC System Design Guidelines, Version 1.0b or higher.