A small number of enhancements to the SNMP protocol would provide a substantial improvement to the protocol in terms of utility and efficiency. The enhancements must fall within the existing SNMP architecture as defined in RFC 2571. The intent of the working group is to focus on enhancements that may be easily defined and implemented which should then promote rapid acceptance and deployment. New protocol operations are within the realm of acceptable enhancements that may be defined. The initial work items include: - A standards-track document defining the mechanism by which the capabilities of a SNMP entity may be determined. This document should also define the interoperability requirements of the SNMP protocol when extensions are present and when they are absent; - A standards-track document defining a mechanism for efficient retrieval, creation, and deletion of rows in tables; - A standards-track document defining a mechanism used to delete an entire subtree of managed object instances. This could, for example, be used to remove all information related to a particular username in the SNMP administrative framework; - A standards-track document defining a mechanism to provide for compression of object identifiers to remove as much redundant information as possible in the payload of the SNMP message; and, - A standards-track document defining a mechanism for bulk transfer of SNMP data. Some of the documents may be combined if the working group so decides. No additional work items may be taken on by the working group until this initial set of work is close to completion. Additional work will have to be approved by the IESG and the IAB.