node, clearing a fault record, adding comments to a log, defining a performance correlation, and SO on. Authentication is required for the user to get access to the administration screen. Most NMS launch will result in a window or Web page requesting user name and password. Once the user is authenticated, based on the group and permissions exercised by the log in id, the user can access the administration screen and perform any of the operations that the user, based on privileges, is permitted to perform. What Is NMS? The building blocks in the GUI components, thus provide the interfaces that can be used during the NMS design of a user-friendly GUI. 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