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DMTF Announces End of Life for DMI
Due to the rapid advancement of DMTF technologies, such as CIM, DMTF is defining an "End of Life" process for its Desktop Management Interface (DMI), which will take place through March 31, 2005. The industry's first desktop management standard, DMI gave component vendors - for the first time - a consistent and non-proprietary way to make their products manageable. DMI generates a standard framework for managing and tracking components in a desktop PC, notebook or server.
"Great support exists for DMI, but in the almost ten years since its introduction the industry - and the DMTF - have evolved considerably," says Andrea Westerinen, vice president of technology, DMTF. "We are announcing this End of Life process well in advance, to keep the industry informed, and to allow vendors and users to plan accordingly."
The DMTF will end active development of new DMI standards on December 31, 2003, but will continue to provide bug fixes and specification errata for an additional 12 months (including publishing updates to the Master.MIF to accommodate things like new processor types). Email support for implementers and users will be available until March 31, 2005.
In addition, DMTF will continue to accept DMI Certifications until March 31, 2005, and publish them for up to six months after acceptance. DMTF's DMI self-certification program, which allows member vendors to self-certify DMI 2.0-enabled products, is a highly successful program that has been around since late 1996, with hundreds of products and companies certified.
"For some time DMI has been in maintenance mode - the only changes to the DMI Master.MIF have been to update enumerations, such as including new processors and operating systems," says Westerinen. "DMTF's CIM and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) specifications were developed to address a broader environment and the additional complexity of today's enterprise and Internet environments, using object-oriented and associative modeling techniques. We are recommending that DMI implementers transition to these newer technologies to provide the next generation of management, monitoring, provisioning and configuration services for systems, software and networks."
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