Joseph Hinkle at MyITForum.com

Part of Steve Ballmer's keynote this morning was a demonstration of the WS-Management technology that Microsoft has been developing in conjunction with other vendors, including, but not limited to, Sun and Dell.

WS-Management is a hardware-based, agentless management processor that allows for remote access to basic functions.  The functions demonstrated today were remote startup, remote shutdown, inventory, and critical hardware failure, all reported without an agent.  Most of the demo was done without an OS even booted!

I'll post some more technical details as I have time to find them.  If you know of any good technical resources for WS-Management, feel free to let me know using the contact link.