Printable versionThe Support Standards Working Group (SSWG) is a joint effort of the Consortium for Service Innovation and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
The primary output of the Consortium is definiting business processes to improve support activities. The two Consortium activities with the closest alignment to the SSWG are Knowledge-Centered Support and Multi-Vendor Support initiatives. Knowledge-Centered Support strives to create business processes that re-use the result or solutions that are the outcome of support activities creating a feedback loop that continually improves the support process. Multi-Vendor Support focuses on business processes that improve support when activities require the close cooperation of multiple vendors, potentially escalating service incidents received by one vendor to another vendor with a larger or more specific focus. Multi-Vendor Support concepts also work equally well across geographically (or politically) distributed divisions within the same organization. There is also interest in allowing Multi-Vendor Support to utilize Knowledge-Centered Support across vendors, sharing the fruits of each other's efforts in a standardized manner.
The DMTF mission is to "To lead the development of management standards for distributed desktop, network, enterprise and Internet environments." This includes asset management, health monitoring and configuration control. The DMTF provides names for the objects managed as well as architecture and usage models to understand how these objects relate to each other.
The SSWG is where the activities of the Consortium and the DMTF intersect: providing support for products used in desktops, networks, enterprises and the Internet. The DMTF helps us to identify the salient objects to be supported and the range of features and methods they provide. The Consortium defines the business processes where those objects are exchanged in support or solution distribution activities. The SSWG adds the framework necessary to create Solutions and Service Incidents and to allow them to be exchanged between interested parties using SSWG extensions to the standard DMTF data models and transports.
The Consortium and the DMTF have integrated the 1.1 releases of the Service Incident Standard (SIS) and the Solution Exchange Standard (SES) into version 2.5 of the Common Information Model (CIM) published on the DMTF web site at www.dmtf.org/standards/standard_cim.php. CIM continues to evolve and updates to version 2.5 are posted on the DMTF web site at www.dmtf.org. Information about how CIM operations are accomplished over HTTP and the specification for mapping CIM object to XML are also available on the DMTF site.