Clients

Clients receive incoming provisioning requests and route them to the following Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) components:

• Provisioning engines

  Provisioning engines process real-time provisioning requests from clients. Clients can be either standard Component Object Model (COM) clients or Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) clients that run on a Web server. With Provisioning Manager, you can configure authentication, impersonation, and other run-time properties to control how provisioning engines establish and maintain client connections.

• Queue managers

  Queue managers process the queued provisioning requests from clients. These requests are generally scheduled for later processing. With Provisioning Manager, you can configure authentication and impersonation properties to control how queue managers handle queued requests.

Clients also perform load-balancing functions across provisioning engines and queue managers.

For more information, see Administering clients.