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CIM Schema - Support Model
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In the past decade, there has been exponential growth in both the
complexity and interdependence of products in the computing industry.
This is due to rapid advances and growth of technology as well as
the increased openness between products. A fundamental principle
of system design in the development of modular, "plug-and-play"
approaches, such as client/server in the computing industry, is
to allow diverse products to work together. Customers increasingly
require and expect products and the companies supporting them to
work together to provide a total solution to their needs. These
trends have created a demand in many industries for support providers
to access support information about related products.
In response to this demand, many support providers have attempted
to publish their information to each other on a more intensive basis,
and to engage in partnerships that allow support analysts to collaborate
on multi-vendor issues. However, without any standardized way to
represent and communicate information, the process of gathering,
publishing and interpreting the immense variety of support information
remains costly, inconsistent and largely ineffective. A solution
exchange standard has broad applicability in the customer support
domain, and has the potential to promote richer communication and
collaboration between two or more support partners, both in solving
specific problems and in evolving a more effective overall relationship.
Several factors are driving the support industry to adopt a standard
method for exchanging Service Incidents. These factors stem from
the multi-vendor nature of the computer and software industry. Many
different companies create the computer components, peripherals,
operating systems, and application software that comprise the personal
computer market. Successfully providing customer support in today's
multi-vendor environment requires high levels of cooperation between
support organizations. Providing such support has created efficiency
and cost challenges to support providers and product vendors. Standardized
incident exchange provides a mechanism for support organizations
to share incident information effectively and ultimately reduce
the cost of supporting computers, thus reducing the total cost of
ownership to customers.
The Problem Resolution Standard (PRS) and associated MOF and UML
is the merger of two prior standards from the Distributed Management
Task Force (DMTF) and the Consortium for Service Innovation (CSI) known
as the Solution Exchange Standard (SES) and Service Incident Exchange
Standard (SIS). The primary purpose of PRS is to define an open
exchange standard that facilitates Solution exchange and Service
Incident processing between cooperating parties, both within an
organization and across organizational boundaries.
All classes defined by this specification begin with the letters
"PRS_" as opposed to the use of "CIM_" for other CIM-related object
models. This prefix is due to historical reasons and all classes
within PRS are to be treated as standard CIM extensions.
Before Solutions can be exchanged, they must be encoded so that
they are consistently created by any compatible Producer and understood
by any compatible Consumer. The exchange of Solutions is more than
simply exchanging data (bits and bytes) and it is more than the
exchange of random information (properties and classes). The exchange
of Solutions requires an understanding between the parties of the
exchange on the type of information being exchanged and the relationships
(associations) between exchanged information to convey complete
understanding or knowledge.
Consumers and Producers vary widely on the complexity and detail
of the knowledge they process, so exchange must support this variety.
Exchange participants "mine" the knowledge to the depth of their
ability. Any exchange standard must also address the need to support
extensibility so Consumers and Producers may extend the object model
for their own unique needs.
It is important to note that this standard is focused on Solution
exchange and not Solution storage. It is intended to facilitate
the exchange of Solution knowledge without favoring any method of
Solution storage.
Service Incident processing builds on the Solution
exchange object model. All of the objects defined for Solution exchange
may be used in Service Incident processing. Service Incident processing
adds five new classes, a transaction model and some new associations
to the Solution object model.
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