Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) provides a provisioning platform and engine for building, maintaining, and extending a set of hosted commercial services on the Windows 2000 Server platform. MPF includes several components that work together to automate the implementation and administration of specific resources, including directory services, mail services, and storage.
Provisioning Manager is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. You can use it to manage security, resources, and performance within MPF, and to customize properties to meet specific needs.
Using Provisioning Manager, you can do the following:
By customizing client properties, you can control how provisioning engines and queue managers handle user connections. You can also implement and manage load-balancing functionality and control how provisioning engines or queue managers implement authentication and authorization levels.
By customizing how provisioning engines execute MPF requests, you can control how security is applied to incoming requests and how MPF implements specific controls for transaction logging and auditing of incoming requests. You can also activate and deactivate individual provisioning engines.
By customizing the properties for queue managers, you can control how security is applied to queued requests and how MPF implements specific controls for transaction logging and auditing of queued requests. You can also activate, deactivate, start, and stop individual queue managers.
You can start and stop auditing and recovery managers. You can also view the information about individual auditing and logging components, including auditing and recovery managers, transaction logs, and audit log.
Caution
By customizing properties of individual namespaces and procedures, you can control how MPF implements provisioning. You can manage permissions for transaction processing, modify XML, and implement specific processing controls, as well as add and delete namespaces and procedures.
By implementing credentials, you can elevate the level of privileges available to a user for invoking a specific procedure.
You can manage MPF and invoke provisioning requests by using a user interface (UI), such as a Web console. You can also submit requests directly using MPF client components or ProvTest.exe. You can use the ProvNamespace COM object to import namespaces, and you can manage MPF settings using tools, such as ProvNamespace.exe and Configuration Database WMI Provider. You can also use the event notification capability of Configuration Database WMI Provider to deliver routine management data to a standard management platform, such as Microsoft Operations Manager.
For more information about how to submit requests directly to MPF, including how to use ProvTest.exe to test the request functionality, see Managing Microsoft Provisioning Framework from the command line.
The Microsoft Provisioning Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) contains additional resources that can help you develop additional namespaces to implement custom functionality. For more information on the SDK and how to use it, see Microsoft Provisioning Framework SDK.