What Is Manageability?
Some big players, such as IBM, are pushing the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) standard. Others, such as Sun Microsystems, are holding back. Sun recently voted against WSDM becoming an OASIS standard, while IBM voted in favor of standardization—a large majority carried the vote.
Before we look in detail at what’s up with WSDM (pronounced wisdom), let’s briefly consider the problem it seeks to solve, namely the knotty issue of manageability. Surprisingly, manageability is a little like quality—concepts that we all know well, but difficult to describe! So let’s bring manageability down to earth by looking at how we all manage the software we use every day.
Email Management
When you use one of the standard email packages, such as Microsoft Outlook (technically known as a message delivery agent), the entities of interest are mostly email messages. You can also schedule appointments, make journal notes, and so on, but for this discussion let’s just consider email messages.
