Pro Windows PowerShell

20.1. A Brief History of WMI

By 1996, a number of companies had recognized the need for a new approach to systems management that offered better standardization and tighter integration among components. The most popular standard management protocol at the time, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), had proven inadequate to meet all the management needs of large enterprises. It is, at its essence, simple, which means that it was targeted at managing network devices, such as routers. Conceived at the end of the 1980s, the protocol had to support devices with little computational power, and thus it had to be extremely lightweight. That requirement unavoidably limited the functionality it could offer. Another thing that needs mentioning is ...