access must be secure. Users must be authenticated before being provided access to authorized functions. Profiling: The user-interface must allow profiling of users such that certain functions are only accessible to certain users. The trend is towards using LDAP as a standard mechanism to manage user accounts, permissions and profiles. In order to reduce operations cost and provide improved service to customers, service providers and network operators are opening up the OSS for use by end users. Customer self-service is highly prevalent in the wireless space, where a customer can go to a provider Web site and view monthly usage and invoices, pay a bill, upgrade his service plan, purchase pre-paid services, change a profile and add additional features, without ever communicating with a customer care representative. Earlier in the book, we have talked about how the front-end Web-based systems have to be integrated with back-office OSS and NMS systems to provide flow-through capability. As carriers deploy NGN OSSs, this should become easier since these systems are usually built on new Web-based technology with open APIs. In the next section, we discuss how to develop component-based OSS to support flexibility and ease of integration. 3.5 Component-Based Architecture The NGN OSS will be largely based on an architecture that defines a component system to be composed of a set of components. A component is an individually packaged piece of software that supports a unique function. A component can be coarse grained, such as one handling provisioning of an IP service, or fine grained, such as one checking on the security level of a service request. These components can execute tasks independent of one another in a distributed environment. Among the primary benefits of a component-based architecture are the plug-and-play aspect of various components (potentially from multiple suppliers) that achieves aggregated functionality; the isolation of change to a business function resulting in more cost-effective maintenance and up