Office Communications Server 2007 R2 provides two management interfaces out of the box. The Admin Tools MMC offers a UI based on the Microsoft Management Console that integrates with the Windows management infrastructure. The WMI layer exposed by Office Communications Server provides a scriptable interface that administrators can use to automate management tasks. This WMI interface provides more flexibility and access to additional settings that might not be exposed at the MMC interface. Office Communications Server settings are stored in three different locations. Global settings are stored in Active Directory. Pool-level settings are stored in the SQL Server database on the back-end server, and settings specific to a server are stored in the local WMI repository on the server. WMI exposes all these settings in a consistent way by abstracting their storage location. Because of the abstraction layer WMI provides, administrators do not need to use a different set of APIs for each storage location—such as LDAP or ADSI to query Active Directory, structured query language to access the SQL database, and WQL to query the local WMI repository.