A method and apparatus for implementing a real-time enterprise event management system is disclosed. The enterprise event management (EEM) system couples together various "event aware" computing resources that publish and subscribe to "events" that provide information about the state computing resources. All of the events are represented as eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) documents. Chains of related events are known as "event streams". In the real-time event management platform, the event streams are available to all other event-aware computing resources operating in the shared event driven environment. The three main components are a real-time messaging system or handing event messages, a rules engine for allowing specific event message handing rules to be created, and a enterprise directory schema for providing a comprehensive directory of all the available resources and the means in which the resources may be accessed.