I’m a small cog in a large telecom company and I recently encountered an acronym I need clarification on.
I believe OSS stands for Operational Support Systems.
My understanding is that this encompasses the basic systems needed to maintain the network such as monitoring network events, generating alarms, etc.
Am I correct in my understanding?
Is there more to OSS than this?
Does it also include maintaining physical and logical inventories?
Anything else I should know?
And last but not least - is there a message board dedicated to general Telecom topics and questions?
OSS Operations Suport System. Methods and procedures (mechanized or not) which directly support the daily operation of the telecommunications infrastructure. The averager LEC (Local Exchange Carrier) has hundreds of OSSs, including automated systems supporting order negotiation, order processing, line assignment, line testing and billing.
Sounds like your assumption’s right. Since it’s hard to do any of the above functions without physical and logical resource inventories, I would include both of them.
Newton’s dictonary is a wonderful resource, and quite often entertaining to read (the above example notwithstanding). Check out the author’s site for more information: http://www.harrynewton.com/
Telecom employee checking in to let you know that you’re exactly right. As far as telecom message boards, there are these from Yahoo! and a Google search for telecommunication message boards turned up a lot of hits if you want to try to sort through them.