RFP and procurement guidelines are a contribution of BT Group plc and Telcordia Technologies and are contained in Appendix C of the Solution Package. These guidelines detail how to select from amongst the MTOSI specifications those that are appropriate to the business problem.
Additional information is contained in the MTOSI deliverable SD2-1 MTOSI Implementation Statement. SD2-1 is part of the TMF 854 deliverable available from the TM Forum document library. This document (TMF 854 SD2-1) includes a set of conformance templates and interoperability guidelines for TMF854, MTOSI XML Solution Set. Given that the interface defined in TMF 854 can be packaged and realized in different ways, SD2-1 is intended to provide guidance to those implementing TMF 854, with the goal of ensuring interoperability among various vendor implementations.
The MTOSI Implementation Statement SD2-1 document has been written to be used as follows:
- As a standard mechanism for service providers to request a specific subset of the TMF 854 capabilities from their vendors
- As a standard mechanism for a management system vendor to state the subset of TMF 854 supporting in their product(s)
- As a basis for an implementation agreement between 2 or more management system vendors.
The Functional Interface Statement (FIS) section of the document defines templates for the objects, interfaces (associated operations) and notifications in the TMF 854 XML specification. These templates are related to the functional aspects of the objects, interfaces, operations and notifications, i.e., whether or not particular capabilities are supported. The non-functional aspects of the objects, interfaces, operations and notifications are discussed in Section 4 of the document. Functional aspects relate to what an entity does, and non-functional aspects related to how an entity provides its functionality, e.g., how fast an operation request is fulfilled on average.