When CMIP requests and responses flow through the network, they are encoded in a hardware-independent format. CMIP services is available on machines with different word sizes (16-bit and 32-bit, for example) and different character string representations (ASCII and EBCDIC). This is hidden from application programs and from CMIP services because CMIP services encodes data from native format to a common format when it sends data across the network. It decodes data from the common format to native format when it receives data from the network.

Basic Encoding Rules (BER) is the common format that is used to encode CMIP information as it flows through the network. BER is not used between local agent application programs and manager application programs.