Patent ID: 7693976

Claim:
A method of managing a telecommunications network, comprising: defining a user profile comprising defined management capabilities, wherein the defined management capabilities comprise authorized network devices, authorized network device resources, customized graphical user interface settings, SNMP community strings, SNMP retry and timeout values, and designations of which NMS servers are used; associating a network device resource corresponding to a network device in the telecommunications network with a reference in the user profile; accessing a network management system through the user profile; generating a network device data request including the reference; retrieving network device data corresponding to the network device resource in accordance with the reference, wherein the network device comprises multiple network device resources, and wherein the reference defines access and management capabilities for which of the multiple of network device resources the user profile has access to; displaying a graphical user interface in accordance with the user profile, wherein the graphical user interface comprises a user-specific customized view with the defined network management capabilities, user-specific fields in the listing of network devices, and a custom presentation format; and utilizing the user profile to physically and logically configure the network device within a scope of that profile, wherein at least one of enabling a network device port on the network device or provisioning a network path on a network device port is conducted.