The development of DMI, 2.0 version June 24, 1998,[1] marked the first move by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) into desktop-management standards.
[2] Before the introduction of DMI, no standardized source of information could provide details about components in a personal computer.
Due to the rapid development of DMTF technologies, such as Common Information Model (CIM), the DMTF defined an "End of Life" process for DMI, which ended on March 31, 2005.
Static data in a MIF would contain items such as model ID, serial number, memory- and port-addresses.
A single workstation or server can serve as a proxy agent that would contain the SNMP module and service an entire LAN segment of DMI-capable machines.