Cisco Systems Inc and Microsoft Corp will pass their jointly- developed Directory Enabled Networks (DEN) specification to the Desktop Management Task Force within eight weeks – some 3 months later than scheduled. The two companies were due to pass the DEN specification – technology designed to integrate network hardware with directory services such as Microsoft’s forthcoming Active Directory or Novell’s Directory Service – back in May, but Winston Bumpus, the DMTF’s president, told us that procedural difficulties had delayed the handing over by a couple of months. We hoped to get the specification by now, he said, but these things always tend to take longer than planned. They’re saying we’ll get it in three to four weeks but it’s more likely to be around eight weeks. Bumpus said the main reason behind the delay was the DMTF’s publication of the next version of its Common Information Model (CIM) in April. CIM is a key part of the WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management) initiative. It provides a way of storing management data (be it from systems, networks or applications) in a common format. Under the network and systems management scenario of the future, all management data will be held within directories in CIM format. The DEN specification is a way of enabling data about network hardware to comply with CIM. Bumpus said Microsoft and Cisco wanted to make the specification compliant with the new CIM Version 2.0 before handing it over to the DMTF. So rather than release it around May as planned they held off instead. Bumpus denied claims by some analysts that the DMTF was notorious for publishing things behind schedule. We’re not just sitting back waiting for the DEN specification and twiddling our fingers, he said, we’ve been doing a lot of work on it ourselves. Bumpus said the specification was now in the hands of the DEN ad hoc working group, which passed it on to its customer advisory board for reviewing. The customers are due to give their feedback at the end of this week. After that the specification goes back to the ad hoc group for what’s known as the ‘last call’, or the final once over and approval, before being handed over to the DMTF.
