Most of the functional interface bundles can be downloaded along with code as opensource modules at sourceforge.net 11.8 NBI (North Bound Interface) Components The NBI components provide the published interfaces for external north- bound applications to interact with the NMS. The external applications can be another NMS or an OSS/BSS solution. While the GUI of the NMS is used for working with network management related operations, some applica- tions will work on formatted data provided by NMS. For example, the net- work outage report prepared by the NMS will be required by an OSS service assurance application. If the interface calls for interaction with the NMS then are published, more applications could be set up to collect and work with data from NMS. The NBI components are composed of two major building blocks, the frame- work involving interface specifications and the server that provides the platform for publishing these interfaces. Some examples of the framework involving an interface specification are: J2EE interface: This involves interface definitions based on Java for publish- ing the interactions permitted when working with the NMS. J2EE Interface is specifically for the Enterprise edition of Java and the opensource implemen- tation framework for J2EE interface can be downloaded from the internet. "JBean" project provides the required interfaces for a Java-based implemen- tation and the aim of this project is to utilize Java Beans and Ecomponent architecture, to easily assemble desperate software components into a single working program. CORBA interface: Different opensource implementations of common object request broker architecture (CORBA) specifications defined by the object management group (OMG) is available for developing interfaces that enable northbound interface applications written in multiple computer languages and running on multiple computers to work with a particular NMS solu- tion. openCCM is an example of opensource CORBA component model implementation. .NET interface: .Net framework 