In the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) integration deployment scenario, MPS is integrated into your existing provisioning process through a series of simple techniques. At the hub of the provisioning process is your existing provisioning system. MPS becomes a spoke within that process and therefore allows you to control the rate at which you incorporate MPS into your provisioning processes. As a result, you can minimize the commitment you must make when deploying MPS within the existing provisioning infrastructure of your data center.
Because you have probably developed your existing provisioning environment over time in a tactical manner, you might be reluctant to make any changes to it. The MPS integration deployment scenario is a method of using the capabilities of MPS quickly without introducing any significant change to your existing provisioning environment.
In this deployment scenario, you have a provisioning system in place that consists of a billing system that sends custom action requests to either
- A collection of custom-developed scripts
- Specific personnel who perform manual execution of
tasks
- Custom applications
In addition, your existing provisioning process might include numerous capabilities that you do not yet feel compelled to replace, because either it is a baseline working solution or possibly because you think it will take time to reproduce the same automation routines within MPS. Nevertheless, you may still want to take advantage of some of the capabilities that are available with MPS providers because your existing provisioning processes do not offer the same facilities.
The following topics describe several ways to integrate MPS into your existing system, including methods that utilize:
- The command line
- A custom application
- Web service