The two types of namespaces included in Microsoft Provisioning System are provider namespaces and non-provider namespaces.
These namespaces directly invoke the functionality of an underlying provider.
For more information on the provider namespaces available in Microsoft Provisioning System, see Provider namespaces available in Microsoft Provisioning System.
These namespaces provide the business logic that implements high-level functionality. Each non-provider namespace can call the procedures of one or more other namespaces.
For more information on the non-provider namespaces, see Non-provider namespaces available in Microsoft Provisioning System.
All namespaces must be registered in Microsoft Provisioning System in order to be available to incoming provisioning requests. Registered namespaces can be accessed through Provisioning Manager, which is the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in used to administer Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF). Each of these procedures is registered with the configuration database. MPF uses the XML schema for the procedure element in both namespaces and requests.
Most namespaces, except the read-only namespaces, can be modified to meet specific functionality requirements. Read-only namespaces, which are indicated by the red highlighting for the namespace in the console tree of Provisioning Manager, are critical to the operation of MPF.
New namespaces can also be created and implemented. Although Provisioning Manager supports creation of namespaces directly in MMC, this is not recommended, especially in a production environment. To implement new namespaces, create them outside of Provisioning Manager by using a text editor to create the required XML files, and then register each namespace with MPF by using Provisioning Manager to import it.
For more information on what a namespace is and how it works, see What a namespace is and How a namespace works. For more information on the providers and provider namespaces installed with MPF and the other providers and provider namespaces available in Microsoft Provisioning System, see Provider namespaces available in Microsoft Provisioning System. For more information on other namespaces available in Microsoft Provisioning System, see Non-provider namespaces available in Microsoft Provisioning System and Custom and other namespaces. For more information on the XML schema and how to implement it, see Working with XML requests. For information on requests, see Request architecture. For information on procedures, see Procedure architecture. For information on providers, see Provider architecture. The Microsoft Provisioning Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) contains additional resources to help you implement procedures, requests, and namespaces. This includes the complete XML schema for all elements and information on how to implement providers. For more information on the SDK and how to use it, see Microsoft Provisioning Framework SDK.